The Eric-Janssonists and the Shifting Contours of Community

THE ERIC-JANSSONISTS
AND THE SHIFTING CONTOURS OF COMMUNITY
H. A R N O L D B A R T ON
An impressive amount has been written about the Bishop Hill
colony, surely more than about any other place associated with the
great Swedish migration to America. Yet behind the colony, with its
tree-shaded streets and weathered brick buildings, lay a community
of a different nature with a history of its own that has never been
systematically investigated throughout its entire life-span: the
company of those in both the Old World and the New who accepted
Eric Jansson as their prophet and embraced his creed.
It seems natural to regard the one community as synonymous
with the other, and this indeed is the usual assumption. But closer
examination reveals that this was far from the case. The composition
of the company of the faithful, from the beginning of Eric Jansson's
ministry in Sweden around 1840 down to the end of the century, was
in constant flux.
Many who had at first flocked to hear Eric Jansson preach the new
dispensation in the old farmsteads in Uppland and Hälsingland or
who had crowded around the book-burnings at Alfta, Söderala, and
Forsa were not prepared by 1846 to heed the prophet's call to depart
for the Promised Land across the sea, although some continued to
revere him and his teachings. Of those who did cross to the other
shore, many left the sect before ever reaching the New Jerusalem on
the Illinois prairie. Moreover, from its founding in 1846, there were
repeated waves of defection from the Bishop Hill colony.
Yet the sect at the same time won new converts over at least a
decade and a half. The emigration of Janssonists from Sweden
continued for eight years or more, and some souls even seem to have
been gained—at least for a time—elsewhere in Scandinavia and in
America. After reaching its low point by the time of Eric Jansson's
death in 1850, Bishop Hill's population doubled during the next eight
years, before the onset of its long post-colony decline.
The publicity in Sweden surrounding the Janssonist sect and its
133
colony at Bishop Hill, as well as the dispersal of former adherents,
both during and after the colony period, to other localities in Illinois
and beyond, are meanwhile universally recognized as factors of
prime importance in the wider history of the great Swedish migration
to this continent. Ulf Beijbom summarized a consensus when he
called the Eric-Janssonists the "core" of the earlier emigration while
the most recent authority on the Janssonist emigrants, Kjell Söder­berg,
has sought to demonstrate this concept in some detail. Yet there
are still significant questions to be raised in this respect and new
insights to be gained.1
It would be of great interest to know more about how, when, and
why the definitive decision was made for the sect to leave the
homeland and seek its future in America. People in the Janssonist
districts of north-central Sweden had become aware of America and
its potentialities through a number of sources by the early 1840s.
Already by 22 November 1845 Hudikswalls Weckoblad reported that the
Janssonists were talking of settling in the Mississippi Valley. Some
three weeks later, on 16 December 1845, Olof Olsson arrived in New
York to scout for a new home in America for his brethren in the faith.
That same fall the first small group of Janssonists attempted to sail to
America from Söderhamn but were shipwrecked near Öregrund and
were forced to wait until the following year to emigrate. Eric
Jansson's son, Captain Eric Johnson, later wrote that his father had
prepared the entire plan for the emigration and colonization of the
group in America, and had selected the leaders for this enterprise,
before he himself secretly left Sweden in the winter of 1846. That
spring Olof Olsson purchased the first land for the Janssonists in
Henry County, Illinois.2
The reason traditionally given for the Janssonist emigration is the
persecution the sect suffered in Sweden. Yet there is good reason to
suspect another, no less significant, motive. The Swedish scholar Emil
Herlenius expressed the view in 1900 that "Eric-Janssonism would
probably have declined at that time [1846], since many had begun to
regain their senses, had the idea of emigrating not combined religious
enthusiasm with lust for adventure and the vision of a good land
beyond the sea." A letter written by Eric Jansson at the time of his
departure from Sweden in March 1846 makes angry allusions to the
"hundreds" who had betrayed him. He beseeched that "all hypocrites
be rooted out of God's holy congregation" and that "God make a way
for all the upright, that [they] may either come to America or go to
the heavenly world." This strongly suggests that the move to America
134
was intended as an ordeal of faith to separate the true believers from
the faint of heart and thereby to vindicate the prophet's authority
over those who heeded the call.3 The rapid radicalization of Eric
Jansson's theology had doubtless caused many to have second
thoughts. Seen in this light, the emigration was itself the first of the
many splits within the Janssonist community, which play so promi­nent
a part in its history and which account in such large part for its
overall significance for early Swedish migration.
The mass migration of the sect began with the departure of Eric
Jansson, his family, and a few others via Kristiania in Norway in the
spring of 1846 and continued over the next eight years, to 1854. Eric
Johnson claimed that there were at the outset some 1,100 of his
father's followers who wished to join his new colony in America.
Swedish clerical reports from 1846 indicate that around 1,030 persons
emigrated that year from the Janssonist districts, mainly in Hälsing­land,
almost all of them undoubtedly Janssonists. This correlates quite
closely with a careful reckoning by Carl Gustaf Blombergsson, the
sect's printer, that 1,001 Janssonists arrived in New York between
early June in 1846 and 20 March 1847. Others thereafter decided to
take the great step when favorable reports reached them from Bishop
Hill. Meanwhile proselytizing continued in Sweden for several years.
By 1854, when the last organized group came over, the entire
Janssonist emigration probably totaled around 1,500, the figure most
often given.4
It has been generally taken for granted that the Janssonist creed
simply died out in Sweden with the Janssonist exodus to America.
Yet not all of those who still remained faithful to the prophet left
Sweden. Among them were one of the prophet's own brothers and
certain others who had played noted roles in the movement. Some
had set out but turned back for family or practical reasons. Was
Janssonism altogether dead and buried in Sweden after the departure
of the last organized group in 1854?
This hardly seems logical and there are at least a few tantalizing
signs that it long lingered on in a kind of concealed underground
existence in certain localities and households. "Down to our own
day," Emil Herlenius wrote in 1900, "one or another member [of the
sect] has lived on, who the whole time has preserved his faith in Eric
Jansson that he was 'the great light sent by God.'" By that time there
were few, if any, who still openly professed the Janssonist faith even
in Bishop Hill itself. Meanwhile, two Janssonists who left the group
in Copenhagen in 1846 made a number of converts among Danish
135
Baptists in and around Vemmeløv Parish on Sjæland (Zealand) to a
Janssonist offshoot sect that called itself the "Congregation of Holy
Brethren" ( D e hellige Brødres forsamling or D e n hellige Brødremenighed),
which moved as a group to Fredericia on Jutland in late 1847 but
seems to have broken up not long after.5 In 1848, a number of
Janssonist converts were made in Norway.
One would like to know more about the twilight years of Eric-
Janssonism in Sweden. I know that many oral traditions about the
prophet and his following still live on in Hälsingland—my grand­mother's
native province—and it may well be imagined that living
memory even today preserves some recollections about the last of the
faithful in those parts. Perhaps the little band who kept the flame
burning in Sweden were able to preserve a more sanctified memory
of their prophet than those who had to face the harsh realities of the
American Midwestern frontier with him.
Emil Herlenius held that the great majority of the Janssonists
remaining in Sweden either returned (at least nominally) to the State
Church or became members of other sects. It seems likely that those
who turned to other forms of pietism may well have brought with
them at least certain ideas from their former creed. Certainly this was
assumed by members of the State Church clergy. A Lutheran pastor
in Ljusdal, Hälsingland, complained in 1853 of how, "as in America,"
sects and factions strove to tear apart all religious unity in Sweden.
In Hälsingland "Eric-Janssonism was followed by Hedbergianism,
which appeared in more subtle and dangerous guise, with Luther's
name on its shield."6
Bishop Hill was not the only, or even the first, Swedish settlement
in America during the 1840s. Occasional individuals and even
families had found their way across the Atlantic since colonial times.
The first Swedish settlement in the Midwest was Gustaf Unonius'
"New Upsala" at Pine Lake, Wisconsin, dating from 1841, which
lasted only a few years. Peter Cassel led twenty-one friends and
relatives from Kisa in Östergötland, joined by a few others on the
way, to establish the first lasting Swedish settlement in the region,
New Sweden in Jefferson County, Iowa, in 1845. Between 1846 and
1849, groups of emigrants from Östergötland and Småland heading
for the Cassel colony or splitting off from it settled at Swede Point
(now Madrid) and Borgholm (now Munterville) in Iowa, and—most
significantly in the present connection—around Andover in Henry
County, Illinois, a few miles northwest of Bishop Hill.
Still, in 1846 the more than 1,000 Eric-Janssonist arrivals comprised
136
by far the largest influx of Swedes into the United States and by the
end of that year Bishop Hill was larger than any of the older
settlements. Numerous letters from the colony described in glowing
terms the blessings of the Promised Land. "I take now pen in hand,
moved by the spirit of the Lord," one colonist wrote in 1847, "when
I consider how God has blessed us here on this new soil by a
hundred fold in both spiritual and worldly goods over what we
possessed in our fatherland." The Janssonists, he claimed, had bought
lands "that could not be exchanged for a quarter of all Sweden."7
These were words to be reckoned with on the old farmsteads and
crofts back home. The "America-letters" were eagerly read to all who
would listen, passed from hand to hand, copied and recopied, and
frequently printed in local newspapers. It was widely assumed, and
remains so today, that the Janssonist exodus precipitated the mass
migration of Swedes to America beginning in the mid-nineteenth
century. Vilhelm Moberg, who more than anyone else gave currency
to the popular saga of the Great Swedish Migration, summarized this
view when he maintained: "If there is anything that has given
circulation to the Legend of America in Sweden, it must be these
letters from Bishop Hill."8
Such a view, plausible as it may seem considering the timing of
the mass emigration, is not to be accepted without critical examina­tion.
Many of the letters about Bishop Hill were written by disgrun­tled
persons who had left it and who roundly condemned its
conditions and leadership. Their letters were widely printed in
Swedish newspapers opposed to emigration as a warning to others
against making the same mistake. Some were no doubt deterred by
such reports. Paul Elmen has expressed a certain skepticism regard­ing
Bishop Hill's publicity value. "Had the Janssonists never left, the
emigration would probably have continued just as it did, and in even
larger numbers," he wrote in 1976. "All that one can say with
confidence is that the Janssonists did publicize the American dream,
and may have something to do with its acceptance in Sweden."9
Nonetheless, many of those who denounced Eric Jansson and his
Utopia wrote enthusiastically about the land they had come to. "It is
truly a land of Canaan," one of them wrote in 1847 from nearby
Victoria, Illinois, in a letter that was promptly printed in pamphlet
form in Sweden, "where milk and honey flow for anyone who can
and will work . . . Here there are no crop failures . . . The Americans
[are] friendly in their manner and treat foreigners like friends and
brothers." "Whoever is young and has money," another former
137
colonist wrote, "can quickly acquire land without giving himself to
Eric Jansson, and young people can find good earnings as w e l l . " 1 0 In
the balance, it thus seems difficult to escape the conclusion that the
letters from Eric Janssonists—both steadfast and apostate—played a
central role in starring the "America fever" in mid-nineteenth-century
Sweden.
Kjell Söderberg, who in 1981 brought out the most recent analysis
of the Janssonist emigration, has, moreover, argued that the group
migrations of Lutheran pietists led to northern Illinois by pastors Lars
Paul Esbjörn (1849), T. N. Hasselquist (1852), and Erland Carlsson
(1853), as well as of the Hedbergian Lutherans from northern
Hälsingland led by the farmer Joris Per Andersson in 1850 and the
Baptists from Dalarna who a few years later settled in Isanti County,
Minnesota, were all directly inspired by the Janssonist group
migration. Young Eric Norelius, a member of Joris Per Andersson's
group in 1850, recalled how "several other companies of emigrants
sailed from Gävle during the summer, and they all were bound for
Henry, Knox, and Rock Island counties, Illinois, as this region was
well known through the Eric Janssonists."11
In time, too, it would appear that the material appeal of the colony
grew at the expense of the original religious mission. The Swedish
Baptist missionary Anders Wiberg, who visited Bishop Hill in 1853,
found that "the fanaticism which characterized the Eric Janssonists in
Sweden seemed . . . to have disappeared to a great extent, and it was
doubtless of great gain for the colony, in both a spiritual and a
temporal sense, that Eric Jansson ended his days so suddenly [three
years earlier]."12The colony was by then approaching the height of its
considerable prosperity before it was ruined by the nationwide
economic crisis of 1857.
If up to 1,500 of Eric Jansson's followers departed Sweden
between 1846 and 1854, their numbers were reduced even before they
reached New York. By one estimate, no less than 127 of them were
the victims of shipwreck while others died of other causes either at
sea or ashore en route to Bishop Hill.1 3 By the end of 1846, some 400
Janssonists had reached their new home, of whom perhaps a third
may have died that winter. A large number who followed were
forced to spend the winter in New York the following spring. The
sailor Johan Edvard Liljeholm recalled, "of about 520 people who had
left their homes, enticed by the bright account of the promised land,
and believing in Eric Jansson's false doctrine, no more than 400
remained, one third of whom were ill."14
138
The schisms that had commenced already before the first
Janssonists left Sweden continued after they reached the further
shore. Some disaffected members left the sect after arriving in New
York. An evidently larger group—including one of the prophet's own
brothers—defected in Chicago. A few found their way back to
Sweden.15
It thus seems remarkable that some historians should imply at
least that Bishop Hill's population was equal to the total Eric-
Janssonist emigration.16 Moreover, among the emigrants who got that
far there were constant defections, causing the faithful to question the
sincerity of many of those who had traveled to America and even
had their debts paid for them in Sweden at the expense of the
common fund. In an undated letter to Sweden, apparently from the
1850s, a Bishop Hill colonist complained:
. . . it has gotten so that there are hundreds of people around
this country whom we have both bought clothes for and paid
their way from Sweden, and some of them have stayed
somewhere along the way and a lot of them have left us here.
All of them have become our worst enemies and persecutors
by spreading terrible lies, not only through letters to our home
country but also here among the people of this country they
have talked, the one more unreasonable than the other.17
Conditions in the colony were so hard during the first two years
that by the fall of 1848 there was a mass exodus of between 200 and
300 of its members, encouraged—whether directly or indirectly—by
the Swedish-born Methodist missionary Jonas Hedström in nearby
Victoria, who had been appalled by their misery. Increasingly, in Paul
Elmen's words, it would seem the colonists were coming to realize
that "no single human act . . . could express in its simplicity the
vision of purity which had captivated them in the farmhouses of
Hälsingland." The following year, 1849, Bishop Hill was scourged by
an epidemic of cholera that carried away some 200 of its members, in
part at least because the prophet, insisting upon the healing powers
of unquestioning faith, obdurately refused until too late to call in
medical help, which in turn proved incompetent.18
At its first peak, between mid-1847 and mid-1848, Bishop Hill's
population probably amounted to close to 800 persons. In April 1850
the lawyer Britton A. Hill, who then represented the colony's
interests, reported to the governor of Illinois that "the population of
139
the colony is about 100 men, 250 women & girls, and 200 children."
The female preponderance, not uncommon in Utopian colonies, is
notable. But this estimate was probably, already then, too great. The
United States census of 1850—the year of Eric Jansson's death
—counted no more than 406 inhabitants on 18 November of that year.
Yet, only three years later, Anders Wiberg reported that the colonists
numbered 700 and in 1856 Baron Axel Adelswärd spoke of a total of
circa 800, which by then may have included a few in Bishop Hill's
new satellite colony at Galva, which he also described. Lars Ljung­mark
is doubtless correct in claiming that Bishop Hill's population
never exceeded this figure.19 Following the economic collapse of 1857
its population steadily dwindled. After the formal incorporation of
the colony in 1853, not all of Bishop Hill's residents joined initially or,
in some cases, ever. In 1858 actual membership totaled 645, of which
147 were males and 258 females over twenty years of age. The United
States census shows 420 residents in 1860 and 200 in 1870. By 1875,
Charles Nordhoff, the pioneer chronicler of American Utopian
colonies, found Bishop Hill "slowly falling into decay." In 1892,
Michael A. Mikkelsen reported that the village had 333 inhabitants.20
Its present population is 160.
Considering the constant defections, it seems remarkable that the
colony's population actually increased from 406 in 1850 to around 800
by 1856, that is, by nearly 100 percent if the latter figure is trustwor­thy.
This calls for at least some explanation. One group of about 100
persons arrived in Bishop Hill from Sweden in December 1850,
following the census of that year, after having lost fifty to sixty of its
members from cholera on the way. A final organized party of some
seventy persons arrived from Sweden in late 1854.21 Some earlier
defectors doubtless rejoined the colony. Both during and after the
colony period, individual immigrants from the homeland came to join
relatives and friends from home at Bishop Hill.2 2 Despite its experi­ments
in celibacy during its first two years and again after 1854,
many children were born in the community.
Moreover, Janssonism won some converts en route and in
America, including some notable figures i n Bishop Hill's history.
Sophie Pollock, who in 1849 became Eric Jansson's second wife, while
born in Gothenburg, had long been living in N ew York when the
prophet, passing through in 1846, won her for the faith. F. U.
Norberg, the stormy petrel of the colony who eventually brought suit
for its dissolution, had been in America since 1842 and came to
Bishop Hill evidently in 1847. Victor Witting, later one of the leaders
140
of Swedish Methodism, was a sailor on ships carrying Janssonists to
America before Joining the colony for a time in 1847. Ragtag
adventurers of Swedish origin but questionable credentials for a
Godly community occasionally passed through, including John Rooth,
Eric Jansson's future murderer, who first showed up with some of his
cronies i n 1847. By the prosperous middle 1850s, the colony had
become more liberal toward those not of its own persuasion. Baron
Axel Adelswärd noted in 1856 that the colonists were "very good to
other poor Swedes who come to them. If they wish they may join
them, but if not they may stay with them for some time and are fed
and housed free."23 It is not unlikely that some did elect to remain.
Janssonism was Swedish in fact but universal in theory. C. G.
Blombergsson claimed that Eric Jansson, during his brief stay in N ew
York in 1846, made a number of converts including some who could
not understand a word of Swedish but were impressed by his
conviction and manner. Once at Bishop Hill, the prophet began
training a select group, the "Twelve Apostles," to carry the Word
throughout the world.24
In 1847, Cleng Peerson, the celebrated "Pathfinder" of the
Norwegian immigration since the 1820s, now a man of sixty-five
years, joined the colony, sold his property in Missouri for the benefit
of the common fund, and took a Swedish wife. The marriage seems
to have turned sour, however, and Peerson departed for the Norwe­gian
Fox River settlement in La Salle County in 1849, leaving his
young wife at Bishop H i l l . 2 5 In the latter year, meanwhile, Jonas
Nylund from Hälsingland led a sizable party to Bishop Hill,
consisting mainly of converts he had made in Norway. Cholera broke
out by the time they reached La Salle, which they then brought to
Bishop Hill, setting off the disastrous epidemic of that year. Accord­ing
to the Lutheran pastor and historian Eric Norelius in 1890, the
surviving Norwegians seem to have moved on to Mission Point on
the Fox River and most of them later became Mormons. Eric Johnson
claimed, however, that three of them stayed on in Bishop H i l l . 2 6
Despite their valiant attempts to learn English—after finding to
their dismay upon arriving in America that they d id not possess the
gift of tongues—the 'Twelve Apostles" met with scant success in their
efforts to convert the unredeemed, with one possible exception.
Indeed, little seems to be known about their labors except in the case
of the tailor Nils Hedin, who visited the Rappists in Economy,
Pennsylvania, the Oneida colony in N ew York state, and Hopedale
in Massachusetts. He is even reputed to have persuaded twenty-five
141
or thirty persons i n Hopedale to move to Bishop Hill. Eric Johnson
wrote that Hedin recruited "a number of persons" from a religious
Utopian colony in Massachusetts. Hedin paid for their transportation
to Bishop Hill, where they were hospitably received. But when the
desired amalgamation failed to work out, the colony paid their return
fare to the East as well as compensation for the work they had done.
There was much contact with the Shakers at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky.27
At any event, the United States census of 1850 shows a single
American family named Hinton from Tennessee and the German-born
bricklayer August Bandholtz living in Bishop Hill. In 1860 the
census reveals only Swedish-born residents and their Illinois-born
children. Neither of these censuses can, however, be considered
entirely reliable.28 Only with the census of 1870, nearly a decade after
the dissolution of the colony, does any influx of non-Swedes become
apparent.
Paul Elmen has pointed to the Janssonists' unresolved dilemma of
seeking "to achieve a monastic exclusiveness and separation and, at
the same time, launch a furious effort to transform and penetrate the
world."2 9 The possible conversion to Janssonism and residence at
Bishop Hill—real or alleged—of non-Swedes remains one of the
obscurest yet most tantalizing aspects of the colony's history. Clearly
there was much coming and going at Bishop Hill during the colony
period and the community seems to have been surprisingly open to
outsiders. The story of its relations with non-Swedish Americans
deserves further research.
It has meanwhile been repeatedly alleged that Bishop Hill was the
mother hive to numerous daughter colonies both near and far. "In
various parts of the west," Olov Isaksson has written, "settlements
arose, populated by ex-colonists."30 Such new centers of Swedish
settlement would naturally have attracted other Swedish immigrants
to their respective areas. Where, specifically, did members—or most
frequently ex-members—of Eric Jansson's sect settle outside of their
Utopia, and under what circumstances?
A special case, previously noted, was that of the defecting
Janssonists who remained in Chicago, beginning in 1846. Although
they d id not really comprise a "daughter colony" of Bishop Hill, since
they had never lived there, they constituted for a time a little "colony"
of their own because most of the twenty-seven persons who left the
Janssonists in Chicago that first year lived to begin with in a house
on Illinois Street between Dearborn and State. They were the first
sizable group of Swedes to settle in the city. Gustaf Unonius, now
142
ordained as an Episcopal priest, first visited Chicago in 1848 and
began his ministry there the following year. He found that the former
Janssonists, who had been compelled to relinquish their worldly
goods to the sect, had been "left almost naked and starving in a
strange land." They provided much of the original membership of his
St. Ansgarius Church. In time other defectors drifted back to Chicago
from Bishop Hill. Together with those few of their countrymen who
had preceded them, ex-Janssonists formed the nucleus of what would
soon become America's Swedish metropolis above all others.31
The largest mass exodus out of the colony took place in the fall of
1848, as seen. Between 200 and 300 persons left at that time, defying
anathema and despite the forfeiture of their goods. Most went first to
Victoria in Knox County, which quickly became a predominantly
Swedish community and the stronghold of embittered anti-Jans¬
sonism.32 Before long increasing numbers settled in other nearby
communities, such as Kewanee, Woodhull, and Alpha in Henry
County; Galesburg, Henderson Grove, Wataga, Oneida, and Altona
in Knox County; La Fayette and Toulon in Stark County; and in Rock
Island and Moline. Carolyn Wilson has found evidence that a group
of Bishop Hill colonists became Baptists and moved to Galesburg
around 1857, where they briefly published a Baptist newspaper,
Frihetsvännen, edited by the former Janssonist Svante Cronsioe. This
group seems to have at least considered moving to Red Oak, Iowa.
From the later 1860s, these break-away groups were joined by
increasing numbers from Bishop Hill following the dissolution of the
Colony and the economic problems this caused many of its former
members. The life and career of Olof Krans is instructive in this
regard: although celebrated as the painter of Bishop Hill colony life
and the portraitist of its pioneers, he spent most of his life residing
and working as a house painter in Galesburg and Altona.33
Galva, a few miles to the southeast, was meanwhile a "daughter
colony" of Bishop Hill in the fullest sense. The town was platted by
two American entrepreneurs in 1854, whereupon the Bishop Hill
colony immediately purchased a block of fifty lots. This gave them so
predominant an interest in the enterprise that they were able to name
the new town Gefle, after the northern Swedish seaport from which
so many of them had sailed, which was soon corrupted into Galva.
Here the colony built a large warehouse for the shipment of its
products on the newly constructed Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy
Railroad, followed by a pork packing house, a general merchandise
business, a bank, and one of the earliest Swedish-American newspa-
143
pers, Svante Cronsioe's D e n Swenske Republikanen. A number of
Bishop Hill colonists lived here after 1854, or later moved here.34
Another outpost was the village of Nekoma in Henry County, a few
miles southwest of Bishop H i l l , established by the colony in 1854 in
anticipation of a rail line that d id not then materialize.35
Olof K r a n s : self p o r t r a i t.
By the later 1860s, land prices had risen to high levels while the
disastrous crop failures in Sweden between 1867 and 1869 brought a
flood of new immigrants to the existing Swedish communities in the
area. This set off what George M . Stephenson has aptly called the
"swarming of the Swedes" out of Illinois to new areas of settlement,
involving numbers of former Bishop Hill settlers, both from Bishop
Hill itself and from other Illinois communities.3 6
By this time, some former colonists had already left Illinois in
search of greener pastures. In 1850, Jonas Olsson had led a party of
eight gold-seekers to California in an effort to bolster the colony's
sagging economy. While all returned, except for a man named
Stålberg who stayed and C. G. Blombergsson who died there, the
venture may well have caught the imagination of other Illinois
Swedes, encouraging them to go out to California.3 7 That same year,
E. U. Norberg, one of the more controversial and intermittent
members of the colony, took the lead, together with Gustaf Unonius,
in promoting the first Swedish settlement at Chisago Lake in
144
Minnesota. Although Norberg soon returned to Illinois, where he
spent his last years near Toulon, this circumstance has apparently
given rise to the frequent claim that a number of Bishop Hill people
were among the early settlers in that area. The evidence of Eric
Norelius, who knew the community well and gave a detailed listing
of Chisago Lake's Swedish pioneers during the first five years of its
settlement seems, however, to disprove this commonly held idea.38
T h e F a r m e r s ' M e r c a n t i l e C o . , B i s h o p H i l l , a r o u n d I 8 6 0 .
( C o u r t e s y Bishop H i l l H e r i t a g e A s s o c i a t i o n . )
In 1848, Anders Blomberg, a tailor from Orsa in Dalarna, together
with another Janssonist missionary visited the Shaker colony at
Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. He was impressed that the Shakers professed
a perfectionist doctrine similar to the Janssonists'. Returning to
Bishop Hill he urged strict celibacy on the Shaker model—an
experiment that had just been abandoned, at least for the next six
years, by the Janssonists. When this was rejected, Blomberg left
Bishop Hill and p i n ed the Shakers. He was followed around 1854 by
ten others from Bishop Hill, including Eric Jansson's widow, Sophie,
and son, Eric. The sequel is that Anders Blomberg visited Sweden as
a Shaker missionary in 1866-67, resulting in the emigration of sixty-three
persons from Älvdalen in northern Dalarna in 1868, most of
whom went to Pleasant Hill. Here the Swedes lived together in the
West Family House, forming a little colony within the colony. In the
1870s, Charles Nordhoff noted that while most of the Pleasant Hill
145
Shakers were Americans, there were also "a good many Swedes."39
The large-scale movement of Swedes out of their older areas of
settlement in northern Illinois, mainly to the west, beginning in the
later 1860s after the breakup of the Bishop Hill colony, certainly
involved an indeterminable number of former colonists who as
individuals or single families joined larger groups of Swedish land-seekers
without Bishop Hill connections. In such cases they are
difficult, if not impossible, to trace.
There were at least a couple of instances, however, of organized
Bishop Hill ventures for colonization further west. In 1869 Major Eric
Forsse (originally Fors), a Bishop Hill colonist who during the Civil
War had raised and commanded Company D of the 57th Illinois
Voluntary Infantry Regiment, composed of Bishop Hill and Galva
Swedes, led some fifty persons from those communities, among them
several fellow veterans from Company D, to Saline County, Kansas,
where they founded the Falun settlement. A few Swedes, possibly
from Bishop Hill, seem to have arrived there already the year
before.40
B i s h o p H i l l ' s v o l u n t e e r c o m p a n y m u s t e r s at t h e b e g i n n i n g of the C i v i l War.
( C o u r t e s y of B i s h o p H i l l H e r i t a g e A s s o c i a t i o n . )
In a letter from Chicago, Anders Larsson, who had there defected
from the Janssonists in 1846, wrote in June 1873 to Sweden that "quite
146
a number of families" were then planning to leave Bishop Hill to
establish a new Swedish settlement in Kansas, where Captain Eric
Johnson had arranged for the purchase of 100,000 acres. Conditions
were believed to be much more favorable there than in Illinois. The
outcome of this venture remains obscure. Eric Johnson, by his own
account, attempted to establish a Swedish settlement at White City,
Morris County, Kansas, which was frustrated by a plague of
grasshoppers. He thereafter returned to Illinois where he and C. F.
Peterson wrote the history of the Swedes in that state, including his
narrative of the Bishop Hill colony, upon which all others have been
in large part based. Still, the census of 1910 showed 641 persons of
first- and second-generation Swedish stock living in Morris Coun­ty—
a respectable number. Very likely some Bishop Hill people settled
there around 1873, while others may have moved on, possibly to the
Falun settlement.41
A privately published family history tells how in 1880 Olof Saline
found land for his own and at least four other Bishop Hill families
near Minden, Nebraska. Persons in or near Bishop Hill told me in the
spring of 1989 of people from the community who had settled around
Holdredge and Broken Bow, Nebraska, and Clay Center, Kansas.
Preserved necrologies of the colonists and their descendants from
between 1899 and 1919, showing places of death, mention these and
nearby localities and also seem to show minor concentrations in such
places as Madrid, Iowa, and Cedar (Cedar Vale), Kansas. A wide
dispersal is likewise indicated, especially in the Plains states, by the
domiciles of former colonists and their children from states other than
Illinois who attended the first Old Settlers' Day in Bishop Hill in 1896
and the centennial celebration of 1946. Already in 1896 the roster
makes it clear that individuals with Bishop Hill connections were
living throughout the United States.42
It is important to remember that those who moved on were not
o n l y Eric Janssonists and Bishop Hill colonists for longer or shorter
periods. They had relatives, friends, and acquaintances in their old
home parishes in Sweden and in other Swedish settlements in
America. Wherever they relocated, they tended to draw others after
them. In time, the newer settlements had offshoots of their own, some
of which by the end of the century may have been in the Canadian
prairie provinces, making the development truly North American in
scope.
One may wonder whether Bishop Hill folk retained a certain
preference for close-knit communities of their own, even when they
147
resettled among other 'Swedes. There would appear to be signs of
this. Those who moved from Bishop Hill to other northwestern
Illinois localities d id tend to concentrate in the communities already
mentioned, which lay mainly to the south and east of Bishop Hill,
and not in others. The equally Swedish area of settlement to the north
and west, including such places as Andover, Lynn Center, Swedona,
Opheim, and Orion, derived its Swedish population principally from
Småland and Östergötland.43 One thinks, too, of Bishop Hill's colonies
in Kansas and Nebraska, to say nothing of the little group at Pleasant
Hill, Kentucky.
Too much should not be made of this point, perhaps, since both
Swedes and other immigrants tended as a whole to settle, if possible,
with others from their own province, parish, or even village within
a parish, and above all with their own kin. This is well demonstrated
in the case of the Swedes.44
Yet a strong communal sense among the Bishop Hill people
cannot be overlooked. They came from parts of Sweden where
ancient traditions of the byalag, or closely integrated village communi­ty,
were still a powerful social force at the time of their emigration.
This ethic was strongly fortified by a common faith and strictly
regulated communal way of life in the Bishop Hill colony. Here the
old ways long survived its formal dissolution. Most of the colonists
who stayed on there continued to live in the communal buildings. In
1924, Anna Söderblom, wife of Sweden's archbishop, found two of
them still living, including a ninety-four-year-old woman who
preserved intact the dress, manner, and speech of her native Alfta
parish in Hälsingland. "It seems hard to leave their old home,"
Anders Larsson wrote in 1873 of those then preparing to move to
Kansas.45
It was no doubt harder for them than for most since their
particular religious dogmas had exposed them to both official and
popular persecution in Sweden and no little hostility from old
Americans and Swedish Americans alike. Under such circumstances
it was natural that those who had kept the faith should be suspicious
and mistrustful toward the outside world, not least as those who felt
they had been duped by Eric Jansson sought to rehabilitate them­selves
by roundly condemning the sect. Michael A. Mikkelsen, in the
early 1890s, found the old colonists notably reticent in speaking of the
past, which he attributed to embarrassment over revealing the
seeming "absurdities" of their former sect. In the early 1870s, Charles
Nordhoff, after visiting Bishop Hill, reputedly muttered, " D— these
148
people; I can't get anything out of them!'46
"Big B r i c k , " B i s h o p H i l l , a r o u n d 1 8 6 0 . ( C o u r t e s y of B i s h o p H i l l H e r i t a g e A s s o c i a t i o n . )
Even with the fading away of the Janssonist creed the former
colonists tended to remain apart from the Swedish-American
mainstream. The Janssonist doctrine of spiritual perfectionism showed
a marked similarity to Methodism, and indeed some leading
Janssonists, such as Jonas Olsson, seem to have had some contact
with Methodism before leaving Sweden. When the Lutheran
immigrant Trued Granville Pearson from Skåne visited Bishop H i ll
in the mid-1850s and sought to prove to some of the colonists that,
in fact, "they were Methodists, that they invoked the same Biblical
passages and used the same reasoning as the Methodists," he received
the reply, "Is that so, have they already learned so much from us?"
Perhaps there was at least some element of truth in this, for the
Lutheran pastor Lars Paul Esbjörn in Andover wrote in 1850 of the
Methodist missionary Jonas Hedström in Victoria that he often
149
preached "the same as Jansson," in contrast to more orthodox
Wesleyan Methodists.47
It was thus a relatively short step for Eric Janssonists to become
Methodists. Jonas Olsson's brother Olof, the sect's land-seeking scout
in Illinois, turned Methodist already in 1846, as did most of those
who left Bishop Hill for Victoria and its environs in following years.
A Methodist congregation was established in Bishop Hill itself by
1864, and it eventually came to include many of the old colonists.48
Moreover, to leave Bishop Hill, or even to affiliate formally with
another denomination, need not have meant renunciation of the basic
tenets of the Janssonist creed. Those who left, perhaps especially after
the prophet's death in 1850, seem to have done so more from
dissatisfaction with the practical leadership of the colony rather than
doctrinal considerations per se. Gustaf Unonius, upon preaching in
Galesburg in the 1850s, encountered a group of Janssonists who
engaged him so hotly in doctrinal dispute that they pursued him
shouting into the street. Very likely they were residents of Galesburg.
L. P. Esbjörn wrote, already in May 1850—the month of Eric Jansson's
death—that most of the Swedes in Galesburg had been Janssonists
who, although they had left their prophet and his colony, were still
"filled with his false doctrine of sinless perfection." To another
correspondent he wrote that same year that many in his area,
"especially in Galesburg," who had left Bishop Hill, were still
"Janssonists in their hearts."49
Still, Janssonism had developed within the framework of Hälsing­land
Devotionalism with its stress upon the individual search for
truth and salvation. Vilhelm Moberg, in studying the letters of the
Bishop Hill colonists, was impressed with how literate and articulate
they were in comparison to the overall cultural level of the Swedish
peasantry in the mid-nineteenth century.50 Not surprisingly, then,
many of the stronger spirits among them would clearly pursue their
own independent spiritual pilgrimages throughout their lives. Some
of the more ardent former Janssonists in Bishop Hill itself were
attracted to Second Adventism, or in some cases Swedenborgianism.
Some joined the Mission Covenant Church. Many remained outside
of any formal denomination. Bishop Hill people who settled around
Falun, Kansas, beginning in 1869, organized a non-denominational
Free Christian Association, where representatives of various Christian
creeds were allowed to preach. Few former Janssonists, however, ever
returned to the Lutheran fold, from which they had once suffered
such unrelenting persecution.51
150
If those who had followed Eric Jansson in the old land and the
new had something of a siege mentality toward the outside world,
their colony at Bishop Hill did not exist long enough ever to become
a fully integrated community, and this surely had much to do with
their diaspora beyond its confines. The Janssonists, while unified
through faith, came originally from scattered localities in north-central
Sweden with marked differences of material conditions,
traditions, and dialects, at a time when peasant loyalties were still
basically to locality and kin. From the beginning, colonists from
different provinces lived and ate apart in the first primitive dugouts.
It has been shown, for example, that a sizable group from Nora
parish in Uppland, most of them relatively late arrivals, tended to
associate, work, and intermarry with their own kind.52
Local differences surfaced in rivalries over power and influence
within the colony. Although Eric Jansson was himself from Uppland
his main base of support had been in Hälsingland and most of his
trusted lieutenants were from that province, most notably from
Söderala, which gave rise to jealousies and frictions. "God save us
from Hälsinglanders!" one of the early Chicago defectors exclaimed
in exasperation.53 After the murder of Jansson in May 1850, his
widow, Sophie, declared Anders Berglund from Alfta titular head of
the colony until the prophet's son should become of age. But upon
returning from the California gold fields in February 1851, Jonas
Olsson rallied enough support to repudiate any claim to a hereditary
succession and quickly gained the leadership. Of the colony's seven
trustees under its charter of 1853, five including Olsson were from
Söderala. Naturally, the "Söderala Five," as they were called, had to
bear the blame when the colony failed financially after 1857. In the
post-colony period, interestingly enough, Anders Berglund became
a lay preacher to the Methodist faction, while Jonas Olsson preached
to a dwindling Janssonist flock in the old colony church until he
became a Second Adventist around 1870.54
These cleavages within Bishop Hill surely affected movement out
of the colony. Eric Johnson noted that those who had stayed behind
in Chicago in 1846 were "all from Västmanland." It has been observed
that when colonists from Nora departed they tended to settle together
in the same places. The Bishop Hill people who went to Saline
County, Kansas, seem to have been largely from Dalarna, as reflected
by their naming their settlement Falun, after its provincial capital.55 It
would indeed seem surprising if detailed analysis of surviving
biographical data did not bear out that, following the colony episode,
151
the old ties of province, parish, and kinship did not reassert them­selves
among Eric Jansson's followers as they renewed their pilgrim­age
in search of new earthly abodes.
In a longer perspective, the Eric Janssonists accounted for only a
tiny fraction of the one-and-a-quarter million Swedish immigrants
who ultimately came to America and Bishop Hill was only one
among their numerous settlements, large and small, across the
continent. Yet the story of this visionary band and their Utopia on the
Illinois prairie is a thought-provoking reminder that mere numbers
cannot be taken as the sole measure of historic significance.
NOTES
1 Ulf Beijbom, A m e r i k a , A m e r i k a . E n bok o m u t v a n d r i n g e n (Stockholm, 1977), 45; Kjell
Söderberg, D e n första m a s s u t v a n d r i n g e n . E n s t u d i e a v befolkningsrörlighet och e m i g r a t i o n
utgående från Alfta socken i Hälsingland 1 8 4 6 - 1 8 9 5 , Acta Universitatis Umensis, 39
(Stockholm, 1981). In addition to Söderberg, Charles H. Nelson has analyzed the socio­economic
background of the Janssonist emigrants in 'Toward a More Accurate
Approximation of the Class Composition of the Erik Janssonists," S w e d i s h P i o n e er
H i s t o r i c a l Q u a r t e r l y (hereafter S P H Q ) , 26 (1975): 3-15. For printed sources on the Eric-
Janssonists and Bishop Hill, see E. Gustav Johnson, "A Selected Bibliography of Bishop
Hill Literature," S P H Q , 15 (1964): 109-22, and "Bishop Hill Bibliography: Additional
Entries," I b i d . , 16 (1965): 26-30.
2 The best discussion of the background to the Janssonist emigration is in Paul Elmen,
Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h : E r i c Jansson of Bishop Hill (Carbondale, Ill., 1976), 111-14. See also
John Norton, "Parson Baird, Bishop Hill, and Manifest Destiny," S P H Q , 23 (1972):
151-68; Wesley M. Westerberg, "Bethel Ship to Bishop Hill: Document (Letter of Olof
Olsson)," I b i d . , 23 (1972): 55-70; Michael A. Mikkelsen, T h e B i s h o p H i l l C o l o n y : A R e l i g i o u s
C o m m u n i s t i c S e t t l e m e n t in H e n r y C o u n t y , I l l i n o i s , Johns Hopkins University Studies in
Historical and Political Science, 10:1 (Baltimore, 1892), 11-14; Eric Johnson and C. F.
Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s . H i s t o r i s k a a n t e c k n i n g a r (Chicago, 1880), 26-28.
3 Emil Herlenius, E r i k - J a n s i s m e n s h i s t o r i a . Ett b i d r a g till kännedom o m d e t s v e n s ka
sektväsendet (Jönköping, 1900), 59; Alan Swanson, "Erik Jansson's 'Ski Letter,'"
S w e d i s h - A m e r i c a n H i s t o r i c a l Q u a r t e r l y (hereafter S A H Q ) , 35 (1984): 338-45; Alan Swanson,
"The Road to Perfection," S c a n d i n a v i a n S t u d i e s , 60 (1988): 438-39. For the overall
significance of deliberate ordeals of faith as sectarian "commitment mechanisms," see
Rosabeth M. Kanter, C o m m i t m e n t a n d C o m m u n i t y : C o m m u n e s a n d Utopias in Sociological
P e r s p e c t i v e (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), chs. 3-4.
4 Florence E. Janson, T h e B a c k g r o u n d of S w e d i s h I m m i g r a t i o n , 1 8 4 0 - 1 9 3 0 (Chicago, 1931),
181-82; Beijbom, A m e r i k a , 123; Lars Ljungmark, S w e d i s h E x o d u s (Carbondale, Ill., 1979),
20; Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 109,197 n. 1; Ernst W. Olson et al., H i s t o r y of the Swedes
of I l l i n o i s , 2 vols. (Chicago, 1908), I, 228; Erik Wikén, "New Light on the Erik
Janssonists' Emigration," S A H Q , 35 (1984): 221-24, and errata, I b i d . , 36 (1985): 68-69. For
passenger lists for the ships involved and many biographical details, see Nils William
Olsson, S w e d i s h Passenger A r r i v a l s in N e w Y o r k , 1 8 2 0 - 1 8 5 0 (Chicago, 1967) (hereafter
S P A N Y ) and S w e d i s h Passenger A r r i v a l s in U . S . P o r t s ( E x c e p t N e w Y o r k ) , 1 8 2 0 - 1 8 50
152
(Stockholm, 1979) (hereafter S P A N U S ) .
5 Herlenius, E r i k - J a n s i s m e n s h i s t o r i a , 68-69.
"Gunnar Westin, E m i g r a n t e r n a och k y r k a n . B r e v från och till s v e n s k a r i A m e r i k a 1 8 4 9 - 1 8 92
(Stockholm, 1932), 67.
7 Albin Widén, När S v e n s k - A m e r i k a g r u n d a d e s (n.p., [1961]), 21; cf. H . Arnold Barton,
L e t t e r s f r o m the P r o m i s e d L a n d : Swedes in A m e r i c a , 1 8 4 0 - 1 9 1 4 (Minneapolis, 1975), 38-39.
'Vilhelm Moberg, T h e U n k n o w n Swedes: A Book about Swedes in A m e r i c a , Past a n d P r e s e n t,
trans, and ed. Roger McKnight (Carbondale, Ill., 1988), 24. The Swedish original is D e n
okända släkten, 2nd edn. (Stockholm, 1968), 24.
'Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 174.
1 0 Albin Widén, A m e r i k a e m i g r a t i o n e n i d o k u m e n t (Stockholm, 1966), 26-28; Gun
Andersson, "An America-Letter to Alfta in 1847: Who Wrote It?" S P H Q , 31 (1980):
321-41; Moberg, U n k n o w n Swedes, 24-29 (Okända släkten, 24-29).
1 1 Söderberg, D e n första m a s s u t v a n d r i n g e n , 204-15; [Eric Norelius,] E a r l y Life of E r ic
N o r e l i u s ( 1 8 3 3 - 1 8 6 2 ) , A L u t h e r a n P i o n e e r , trans. Emeroy Johnson (Rock Island, Ill., 1934),
98.
12John Norton, trans, and ed., "Anders Wiberg's Account of a Trip to the United States
in 1852-1853," S P H Q , 29 (1978): 105; Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 46.
"Janson, S w e d i s h I m m i g r a t i o n , 127.
1 4 Johan Edvard Liljeholm, D e t t a förlovade l a n d . Resa i A m e r i k a 1 8 4 6 - 1 8 5 0 , ed. Olov
Isaksson (Stockholm, 1981), 40-41.
1 5 Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 121-22.
16See, for example, Janson, S w e d i s h I m m i g r a t i o n , 127.
1 7 Widén, A m e r i k a e m i g r a t i o n e n , 60; Barton, L e t t e r s , 83; Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r ne
i I l l i n o i s , 28.
1 8 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 34-35; Olson et al.. H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of
I l l i n o i s , I, 234; Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 142-44; N. M. Liljegren, N . O. Westergreen,
and C. G. Wallenius, S v e n s k a M e t o d i s m e n i A m e r i k a (Chicago, 1895), 168-69.
1 9 Henry E. Pratt, ed., "The Murder of Eric Jansson, Leader of the Bishop Hill Colony,"
J o u r n a l of t h e Illinois State H i s t o r i c a l S o c i e t y , 45 (1952): 64; Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h,
117, 148; Norton, "Wiberg's Account," 104; Barton, L e t t e r s , 81; Ljungmark, S w e d i sh
E x o d u s , 20.
2 0 Philip J. Stoneberg in Henry L Kiner, H i s t o r y of H e n r y C o u n t y , I l l i n o i s , 2 vols.
(Chicago, 1910), I, 641-42,645; Charles Nordhoff, T h e C o m m u n i s t i c Societies of t h e U n i t ed
S t a t e s (New York, 1965), 348; Mikkelsen, B i s h o p H i l l C o l o n y , 71.
2 1 Eric Norelius, D e s v e n s k a L u t e r s k a Församlingarnas och S v e n s k a r n e s H i s t o r i a i A m e r i k a ,
2 vols. (Rock Island, Ill., 1890, 1916), I, 29-30.
2 2 In 1962, Folke Hedblom met Swedish immigrants who had arrived in Bishop Hill as
late as 1901. See his "Hos hälsingar i Bishop Hill. Frän en Amerika-resa 1962," in
Hälsingerunor. E n h e m b y g d s b o k 1963 (Bollnäs, Sweden, 1963), 17-18.
2 3 Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 103-04, 120, 138-39, 202-03; Olson et al, H i s t o r y of t h e
Swedes of I l l i n o i s , I, 269-70; Barton, L e t t e r s , 81.
2 4 Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 132-33.
2 5 Theodore C. Blegen, "Cleng Peerson and Norwegian Immigration," M i s s i s s i p p i V a l l ey
H i s t o r i c a l R e v i e w , 7 (1921): 323. A somewhat imaginative account is Hjalmar R. Holand,
D e n o r s k e S e t t l e m e n t e r s H i s t o r i e (Ephraim, Wis., 1908), 96-97.
2 6 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 37; Norelius, D e s v e n s k a L u t e r s k a , I, 29;
Olson et al, H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of I l l i n o i s , 227. No persons of Norwegian birth show
up in either the 1850 or 1860 U. S. censuses for Bishop Hill, but in unpublished studies
153
Carolyn Wilson of Minneapolis and Roy Ostrom of Williamsfield, Illinois, have
criticized the 1850 and 1860 censuses, respectively, for being demonstrably incomplete.
Mr. Ostrom remembers of hearing of one "Norsk Ole" in Bishop Hill and his
unpublished listing of necrologies of former colonists includes the Norwegian-born Ole
Anderson, who died in 1901.
2 7 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 47; Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 132-34;
Olov Isaksson and Sören Hallgren, B i s h o p H i l l : A Utopia on t h e P r a i r i e (Stockholm, 1969),
94.
2 8 See note 26, above.
2 9 Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 133.
3 0 Isaksson and Hallgren, Bishop H i l l , 146; cf. 153. This point is strongly stressed in
Söderberg, D e n första m a s s u t v a n d r i n g e n , 208, 217; see also 206 (map).
3 1 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 234; Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 121-22,
148-49; Ulf Beijbom, Swedes in C h i c a g o : A D e m o g r a p h i c a n d Social S t u d y of t h e 1 8 4 6 - 1 8 80
I m m i g r a t i o n , Studia Historica Upsaliensia, 38 (Uppsala, 1971), 44-45; [Gustaf Unonius,]
A P i o n e e r in N o r t h A m e r i c a , 1 8 4 1 - 1 8 5 8 : The M e m o i r s of Gustaf U n o n i u s , trans. Jonas Oscar
Backlund, ed. Nils William Olsson, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, 1950,1960), II, 166-67.
32Norelius, D e s v e n s k a L u t e r s k a , I, 75; Liljegren et al., S v e n s k a M e t o d i s m e n , 168-69.
3 3 See Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , and Olson et al, H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes
of I l l i n o i s for details on early Swedish settlers in these communities, identifying those
who came from Bishop Hill. Part of Johnson and Peterson has been translated by Leroy
Williamson as T h e Swedes in K n o x C o u n t y , Illinois (Galesburg, Ill, 1979). Conversation
with Carolyn A. Wilson, February 1989; J. Oscar Backlund, A C e n t u r y of t h e S w e d i s h -
A m e r i c a n Press (Chicago, 1952), 21-22. Söderberg, D e n första m a s s u t v a n d r i n g e n , 200-03,
emphasizes above-average rates of emigration from the former "Janssonist" parishes in
Sweden down to the end of the nineteenth century. George Swank, P a i n t e r K r a n s : O K
of B i s h o p H i l l C o l o n y (Galva, Ill., 1976).
3 4 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 64-68; Olson et al, H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of
I l l i n o i s , I, 337-40; T h e H i s t o r y of H e n r y C o u n t y , Illinois (Chicago, 1877), 168-70; Barton,
L e t t e r s , 79, 81.
3 5 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 62-63; Kiner, H i s t o r y of H e n r y C o u n t y , I l l . ,
I, 620-21.
3 6 George M. Stephenson, T h e R e l i g i o u s Aspects of S w e d i s h I m m i g r a t i o n (Minneapolis,
1932), title to Ch. 21.
3 7 See Isaksson and Hallgren, B i s h o p H i l l , 155-61; Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i
I l l i n o i s , 39.
^Emeroy Johnson, "Early History of Chisago Lake Re-Examined," S A H Q , 39 (1988):
215-25; Norelius, D e s v e n s k a L u t e r s k a , I, 541-42, 554-58.
3 9 Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 133-34,168, 200 n. 45; Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r ne
i I l l i n o i s , 47; Olson et al., H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of I l l i n o i s , I, 250-51; Olsson, S P A N U S , 95;
E. Gustav Johnson, "A Scholarly Testament," S P H Q , 25 (1975): 125-26; Nordhoff,
C o m m u n i s t i c S o c i e t i e s , 212.
4 0 DeVere E. Blomberg, ed., H e a r t a n d H e r i t a g e : C e n t e n n i a l Reflections—Falun Lutheran
C h u r c h a n d C o m m u n i t y , 1 8 8 7 - 1 9 8 7 (Ellsworth, Kan., 1987), 2,58; Otto Robert Landelius,
S w e d i s h P l a c e - N a m e s in N o r t h A m e r i c a , trans. Karin Franzén, ed. Raymond Jarvi
(Carbondale, Ill., 1985), 73. Conversation with Ronald E. Nelson, Bishop Hill, and John
Norton, Moline, Ill., January, 1989.
4 1 Widén, När S v e n s k - A m e r i k a g r u n d a d e s , 118; Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s ,
297-98; Helge Nelson, T h e Swedes and the S w e d i s h S e t t l e m e n t s in N o r t h A m e r i c a , 2 vols.
154
(Lund, 1943), I, 271, and II, map 55.
4 2 Minnie C. Norlin, K a r i n (n. p., 1936), 45. (This rare source was lent to me by Linda
Holden, Bishop Hill.) Conversations with Ronald E. Nelson and Rias Spet, Bishop Hill,
and Lowell E. Bjorling, Altona, Ill. For attendance at the 1896 and 1946 celebrations, see
Theo. J. Anderson, ed., 1 0 0 Y e a r s : A H i s t o r y of Bishop H i l l , I l l i n o i s (Chicago, 1946), esp.
200-01,235,245-47. The necrologies have been complied by Roy Ostrom, Williamsfield,
Ill.
4 3 Nelson, Swedes and S w e d i s h S e t t l e m e n t s , I, 166.
4 4 See, for example, Robert C. Ostergren, A C o m m u n i t y T r a n s p l a n t e d : T h e T r a n s - A t l a n t i c
Experiences of a S w e d i s h I m m i g r a n t S e t t l e m e n t in the Upper M i d d l e West (Madison, Wis.,
1988).
4 5 Anna Söderblom, E n A m e r i k a b o k (Stockholm, 1925), 196-97; Widén, När S v e n s k - A m e r i ka
g r u n d a d e s , 118.
"'Mikkelsen, Bishop Hill C o l o n y , 6-7.
4 7 Arvid Bjerking, ed., E n skånsk b a n b r y t a r e i A m e r i k a . T r u e d G r a n v i l l e P e a r s o n s självbiografi
(Oskarshamn, Sweden, 1937), 56; Westin, E m i g r a n t e r n a och k y r k a n , 43. Cf. Norelius, D e
s v e n s k a L u t e r s k a , I, 154; Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 24; Elmen, Wheat
F l o u r M e s s i a h , 123-24.
4 8 Olson et al., H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of I l l i n o i s , I, 266; Liljegren et al., S v e n s k a M e t o d i s m e n,
200-03.
4 9Unonius, A P i o n e e r , II, 203; Westin, E m i g r a n t e r n a och k y r k a n , 43; Norelius, D e s v e n s ka
L u t e r s k a , I, 133.
5 0 Moberg, U n k n o w n Swedes, 24.
5 1 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 52-54; Olson et al., H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of
I l l i n o i s , I, 266; Blomberg, H e a r t a n d H e r i t a g e , 2, 58; Lilly Setterdahl, "The End of Eric
Janssonism: Religious Life in Bishop Hill in the Post-Colony Period," W e s t e r n Illinois
R e g i o n a l S t u d i e s , 11 (1988): 39-54.
5 2 Lilly Setterdahl, "Emigrant Letters by Bishop Hill Colonists from Nora Parish,"
W e s t e r n I l l i n o i s R e g i o n a l S t u d i e s , 1 (1978): 127-28.
5 3 Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 1 2 2 ; cf. 145.
5 4 Setterdahl, "Emigrant Letters," 121,127-28; Stephenson, R e l i g i o u s A s p e c t s , 70-71; Olson
et al., H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of I l l i n o i s , I, 266; Mikkelsen, B i s h o p H i l l C o l o n y , 70-71. The
strongly Janssonist parishes of Nora, Torstuna, and Österunda lay in Västmanland
County (län) but were part of the historic province of Uppland, which has sometimes
created some confusion.
5 5 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 234; Setterdahl, "Emigrant Letters," 127;
Nelson, S w e d i s h S e t t l e m e n t s , I, 277.
155

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

All rights held by the Swedish-American Historical Society. No part of this publication, except in the case of brief quotations, may be reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the editor and, where appropriate, the original author(s). For more information, please email the Society at info@swedishamericanhist.org

THE ERIC-JANSSONISTS
AND THE SHIFTING CONTOURS OF COMMUNITY
H. A R N O L D B A R T ON
An impressive amount has been written about the Bishop Hill
colony, surely more than about any other place associated with the
great Swedish migration to America. Yet behind the colony, with its
tree-shaded streets and weathered brick buildings, lay a community
of a different nature with a history of its own that has never been
systematically investigated throughout its entire life-span: the
company of those in both the Old World and the New who accepted
Eric Jansson as their prophet and embraced his creed.
It seems natural to regard the one community as synonymous
with the other, and this indeed is the usual assumption. But closer
examination reveals that this was far from the case. The composition
of the company of the faithful, from the beginning of Eric Jansson's
ministry in Sweden around 1840 down to the end of the century, was
in constant flux.
Many who had at first flocked to hear Eric Jansson preach the new
dispensation in the old farmsteads in Uppland and Hälsingland or
who had crowded around the book-burnings at Alfta, Söderala, and
Forsa were not prepared by 1846 to heed the prophet's call to depart
for the Promised Land across the sea, although some continued to
revere him and his teachings. Of those who did cross to the other
shore, many left the sect before ever reaching the New Jerusalem on
the Illinois prairie. Moreover, from its founding in 1846, there were
repeated waves of defection from the Bishop Hill colony.
Yet the sect at the same time won new converts over at least a
decade and a half. The emigration of Janssonists from Sweden
continued for eight years or more, and some souls even seem to have
been gained—at least for a time—elsewhere in Scandinavia and in
America. After reaching its low point by the time of Eric Jansson's
death in 1850, Bishop Hill's population doubled during the next eight
years, before the onset of its long post-colony decline.
The publicity in Sweden surrounding the Janssonist sect and its
133
colony at Bishop Hill, as well as the dispersal of former adherents,
both during and after the colony period, to other localities in Illinois
and beyond, are meanwhile universally recognized as factors of
prime importance in the wider history of the great Swedish migration
to this continent. Ulf Beijbom summarized a consensus when he
called the Eric-Janssonists the "core" of the earlier emigration while
the most recent authority on the Janssonist emigrants, Kjell Söder­berg,
has sought to demonstrate this concept in some detail. Yet there
are still significant questions to be raised in this respect and new
insights to be gained.1
It would be of great interest to know more about how, when, and
why the definitive decision was made for the sect to leave the
homeland and seek its future in America. People in the Janssonist
districts of north-central Sweden had become aware of America and
its potentialities through a number of sources by the early 1840s.
Already by 22 November 1845 Hudikswalls Weckoblad reported that the
Janssonists were talking of settling in the Mississippi Valley. Some
three weeks later, on 16 December 1845, Olof Olsson arrived in New
York to scout for a new home in America for his brethren in the faith.
That same fall the first small group of Janssonists attempted to sail to
America from Söderhamn but were shipwrecked near Öregrund and
were forced to wait until the following year to emigrate. Eric
Jansson's son, Captain Eric Johnson, later wrote that his father had
prepared the entire plan for the emigration and colonization of the
group in America, and had selected the leaders for this enterprise,
before he himself secretly left Sweden in the winter of 1846. That
spring Olof Olsson purchased the first land for the Janssonists in
Henry County, Illinois.2
The reason traditionally given for the Janssonist emigration is the
persecution the sect suffered in Sweden. Yet there is good reason to
suspect another, no less significant, motive. The Swedish scholar Emil
Herlenius expressed the view in 1900 that "Eric-Janssonism would
probably have declined at that time [1846], since many had begun to
regain their senses, had the idea of emigrating not combined religious
enthusiasm with lust for adventure and the vision of a good land
beyond the sea." A letter written by Eric Jansson at the time of his
departure from Sweden in March 1846 makes angry allusions to the
"hundreds" who had betrayed him. He beseeched that "all hypocrites
be rooted out of God's holy congregation" and that "God make a way
for all the upright, that [they] may either come to America or go to
the heavenly world." This strongly suggests that the move to America
134
was intended as an ordeal of faith to separate the true believers from
the faint of heart and thereby to vindicate the prophet's authority
over those who heeded the call.3 The rapid radicalization of Eric
Jansson's theology had doubtless caused many to have second
thoughts. Seen in this light, the emigration was itself the first of the
many splits within the Janssonist community, which play so promi­nent
a part in its history and which account in such large part for its
overall significance for early Swedish migration.
The mass migration of the sect began with the departure of Eric
Jansson, his family, and a few others via Kristiania in Norway in the
spring of 1846 and continued over the next eight years, to 1854. Eric
Johnson claimed that there were at the outset some 1,100 of his
father's followers who wished to join his new colony in America.
Swedish clerical reports from 1846 indicate that around 1,030 persons
emigrated that year from the Janssonist districts, mainly in Hälsing­land,
almost all of them undoubtedly Janssonists. This correlates quite
closely with a careful reckoning by Carl Gustaf Blombergsson, the
sect's printer, that 1,001 Janssonists arrived in New York between
early June in 1846 and 20 March 1847. Others thereafter decided to
take the great step when favorable reports reached them from Bishop
Hill. Meanwhile proselytizing continued in Sweden for several years.
By 1854, when the last organized group came over, the entire
Janssonist emigration probably totaled around 1,500, the figure most
often given.4
It has been generally taken for granted that the Janssonist creed
simply died out in Sweden with the Janssonist exodus to America.
Yet not all of those who still remained faithful to the prophet left
Sweden. Among them were one of the prophet's own brothers and
certain others who had played noted roles in the movement. Some
had set out but turned back for family or practical reasons. Was
Janssonism altogether dead and buried in Sweden after the departure
of the last organized group in 1854?
This hardly seems logical and there are at least a few tantalizing
signs that it long lingered on in a kind of concealed underground
existence in certain localities and households. "Down to our own
day," Emil Herlenius wrote in 1900, "one or another member [of the
sect] has lived on, who the whole time has preserved his faith in Eric
Jansson that he was 'the great light sent by God.'" By that time there
were few, if any, who still openly professed the Janssonist faith even
in Bishop Hill itself. Meanwhile, two Janssonists who left the group
in Copenhagen in 1846 made a number of converts among Danish
135
Baptists in and around Vemmeløv Parish on Sjæland (Zealand) to a
Janssonist offshoot sect that called itself the "Congregation of Holy
Brethren" ( D e hellige Brødres forsamling or D e n hellige Brødremenighed),
which moved as a group to Fredericia on Jutland in late 1847 but
seems to have broken up not long after.5 In 1848, a number of
Janssonist converts were made in Norway.
One would like to know more about the twilight years of Eric-
Janssonism in Sweden. I know that many oral traditions about the
prophet and his following still live on in Hälsingland—my grand­mother's
native province—and it may well be imagined that living
memory even today preserves some recollections about the last of the
faithful in those parts. Perhaps the little band who kept the flame
burning in Sweden were able to preserve a more sanctified memory
of their prophet than those who had to face the harsh realities of the
American Midwestern frontier with him.
Emil Herlenius held that the great majority of the Janssonists
remaining in Sweden either returned (at least nominally) to the State
Church or became members of other sects. It seems likely that those
who turned to other forms of pietism may well have brought with
them at least certain ideas from their former creed. Certainly this was
assumed by members of the State Church clergy. A Lutheran pastor
in Ljusdal, Hälsingland, complained in 1853 of how, "as in America,"
sects and factions strove to tear apart all religious unity in Sweden.
In Hälsingland "Eric-Janssonism was followed by Hedbergianism,
which appeared in more subtle and dangerous guise, with Luther's
name on its shield."6
Bishop Hill was not the only, or even the first, Swedish settlement
in America during the 1840s. Occasional individuals and even
families had found their way across the Atlantic since colonial times.
The first Swedish settlement in the Midwest was Gustaf Unonius'
"New Upsala" at Pine Lake, Wisconsin, dating from 1841, which
lasted only a few years. Peter Cassel led twenty-one friends and
relatives from Kisa in Östergötland, joined by a few others on the
way, to establish the first lasting Swedish settlement in the region,
New Sweden in Jefferson County, Iowa, in 1845. Between 1846 and
1849, groups of emigrants from Östergötland and Småland heading
for the Cassel colony or splitting off from it settled at Swede Point
(now Madrid) and Borgholm (now Munterville) in Iowa, and—most
significantly in the present connection—around Andover in Henry
County, Illinois, a few miles northwest of Bishop Hill.
Still, in 1846 the more than 1,000 Eric-Janssonist arrivals comprised
136
by far the largest influx of Swedes into the United States and by the
end of that year Bishop Hill was larger than any of the older
settlements. Numerous letters from the colony described in glowing
terms the blessings of the Promised Land. "I take now pen in hand,
moved by the spirit of the Lord," one colonist wrote in 1847, "when
I consider how God has blessed us here on this new soil by a
hundred fold in both spiritual and worldly goods over what we
possessed in our fatherland." The Janssonists, he claimed, had bought
lands "that could not be exchanged for a quarter of all Sweden."7
These were words to be reckoned with on the old farmsteads and
crofts back home. The "America-letters" were eagerly read to all who
would listen, passed from hand to hand, copied and recopied, and
frequently printed in local newspapers. It was widely assumed, and
remains so today, that the Janssonist exodus precipitated the mass
migration of Swedes to America beginning in the mid-nineteenth
century. Vilhelm Moberg, who more than anyone else gave currency
to the popular saga of the Great Swedish Migration, summarized this
view when he maintained: "If there is anything that has given
circulation to the Legend of America in Sweden, it must be these
letters from Bishop Hill."8
Such a view, plausible as it may seem considering the timing of
the mass emigration, is not to be accepted without critical examina­tion.
Many of the letters about Bishop Hill were written by disgrun­tled
persons who had left it and who roundly condemned its
conditions and leadership. Their letters were widely printed in
Swedish newspapers opposed to emigration as a warning to others
against making the same mistake. Some were no doubt deterred by
such reports. Paul Elmen has expressed a certain skepticism regard­ing
Bishop Hill's publicity value. "Had the Janssonists never left, the
emigration would probably have continued just as it did, and in even
larger numbers," he wrote in 1976. "All that one can say with
confidence is that the Janssonists did publicize the American dream,
and may have something to do with its acceptance in Sweden."9
Nonetheless, many of those who denounced Eric Jansson and his
Utopia wrote enthusiastically about the land they had come to. "It is
truly a land of Canaan," one of them wrote in 1847 from nearby
Victoria, Illinois, in a letter that was promptly printed in pamphlet
form in Sweden, "where milk and honey flow for anyone who can
and will work . . . Here there are no crop failures . . . The Americans
[are] friendly in their manner and treat foreigners like friends and
brothers." "Whoever is young and has money," another former
137
colonist wrote, "can quickly acquire land without giving himself to
Eric Jansson, and young people can find good earnings as w e l l . " 1 0 In
the balance, it thus seems difficult to escape the conclusion that the
letters from Eric Janssonists—both steadfast and apostate—played a
central role in starring the "America fever" in mid-nineteenth-century
Sweden.
Kjell Söderberg, who in 1981 brought out the most recent analysis
of the Janssonist emigration, has, moreover, argued that the group
migrations of Lutheran pietists led to northern Illinois by pastors Lars
Paul Esbjörn (1849), T. N. Hasselquist (1852), and Erland Carlsson
(1853), as well as of the Hedbergian Lutherans from northern
Hälsingland led by the farmer Joris Per Andersson in 1850 and the
Baptists from Dalarna who a few years later settled in Isanti County,
Minnesota, were all directly inspired by the Janssonist group
migration. Young Eric Norelius, a member of Joris Per Andersson's
group in 1850, recalled how "several other companies of emigrants
sailed from Gävle during the summer, and they all were bound for
Henry, Knox, and Rock Island counties, Illinois, as this region was
well known through the Eric Janssonists."11
In time, too, it would appear that the material appeal of the colony
grew at the expense of the original religious mission. The Swedish
Baptist missionary Anders Wiberg, who visited Bishop Hill in 1853,
found that "the fanaticism which characterized the Eric Janssonists in
Sweden seemed . . . to have disappeared to a great extent, and it was
doubtless of great gain for the colony, in both a spiritual and a
temporal sense, that Eric Jansson ended his days so suddenly [three
years earlier]."12The colony was by then approaching the height of its
considerable prosperity before it was ruined by the nationwide
economic crisis of 1857.
If up to 1,500 of Eric Jansson's followers departed Sweden
between 1846 and 1854, their numbers were reduced even before they
reached New York. By one estimate, no less than 127 of them were
the victims of shipwreck while others died of other causes either at
sea or ashore en route to Bishop Hill.1 3 By the end of 1846, some 400
Janssonists had reached their new home, of whom perhaps a third
may have died that winter. A large number who followed were
forced to spend the winter in New York the following spring. The
sailor Johan Edvard Liljeholm recalled, "of about 520 people who had
left their homes, enticed by the bright account of the promised land,
and believing in Eric Jansson's false doctrine, no more than 400
remained, one third of whom were ill."14
138
The schisms that had commenced already before the first
Janssonists left Sweden continued after they reached the further
shore. Some disaffected members left the sect after arriving in New
York. An evidently larger group—including one of the prophet's own
brothers—defected in Chicago. A few found their way back to
Sweden.15
It thus seems remarkable that some historians should imply at
least that Bishop Hill's population was equal to the total Eric-
Janssonist emigration.16 Moreover, among the emigrants who got that
far there were constant defections, causing the faithful to question the
sincerity of many of those who had traveled to America and even
had their debts paid for them in Sweden at the expense of the
common fund. In an undated letter to Sweden, apparently from the
1850s, a Bishop Hill colonist complained:
. . . it has gotten so that there are hundreds of people around
this country whom we have both bought clothes for and paid
their way from Sweden, and some of them have stayed
somewhere along the way and a lot of them have left us here.
All of them have become our worst enemies and persecutors
by spreading terrible lies, not only through letters to our home
country but also here among the people of this country they
have talked, the one more unreasonable than the other.17
Conditions in the colony were so hard during the first two years
that by the fall of 1848 there was a mass exodus of between 200 and
300 of its members, encouraged—whether directly or indirectly—by
the Swedish-born Methodist missionary Jonas Hedström in nearby
Victoria, who had been appalled by their misery. Increasingly, in Paul
Elmen's words, it would seem the colonists were coming to realize
that "no single human act . . . could express in its simplicity the
vision of purity which had captivated them in the farmhouses of
Hälsingland." The following year, 1849, Bishop Hill was scourged by
an epidemic of cholera that carried away some 200 of its members, in
part at least because the prophet, insisting upon the healing powers
of unquestioning faith, obdurately refused until too late to call in
medical help, which in turn proved incompetent.18
At its first peak, between mid-1847 and mid-1848, Bishop Hill's
population probably amounted to close to 800 persons. In April 1850
the lawyer Britton A. Hill, who then represented the colony's
interests, reported to the governor of Illinois that "the population of
139
the colony is about 100 men, 250 women & girls, and 200 children."
The female preponderance, not uncommon in Utopian colonies, is
notable. But this estimate was probably, already then, too great. The
United States census of 1850—the year of Eric Jansson's death
—counted no more than 406 inhabitants on 18 November of that year.
Yet, only three years later, Anders Wiberg reported that the colonists
numbered 700 and in 1856 Baron Axel Adelswärd spoke of a total of
circa 800, which by then may have included a few in Bishop Hill's
new satellite colony at Galva, which he also described. Lars Ljung­mark
is doubtless correct in claiming that Bishop Hill's population
never exceeded this figure.19 Following the economic collapse of 1857
its population steadily dwindled. After the formal incorporation of
the colony in 1853, not all of Bishop Hill's residents joined initially or,
in some cases, ever. In 1858 actual membership totaled 645, of which
147 were males and 258 females over twenty years of age. The United
States census shows 420 residents in 1860 and 200 in 1870. By 1875,
Charles Nordhoff, the pioneer chronicler of American Utopian
colonies, found Bishop Hill "slowly falling into decay." In 1892,
Michael A. Mikkelsen reported that the village had 333 inhabitants.20
Its present population is 160.
Considering the constant defections, it seems remarkable that the
colony's population actually increased from 406 in 1850 to around 800
by 1856, that is, by nearly 100 percent if the latter figure is trustwor­thy.
This calls for at least some explanation. One group of about 100
persons arrived in Bishop Hill from Sweden in December 1850,
following the census of that year, after having lost fifty to sixty of its
members from cholera on the way. A final organized party of some
seventy persons arrived from Sweden in late 1854.21 Some earlier
defectors doubtless rejoined the colony. Both during and after the
colony period, individual immigrants from the homeland came to join
relatives and friends from home at Bishop Hill.2 2 Despite its experi­ments
in celibacy during its first two years and again after 1854,
many children were born in the community.
Moreover, Janssonism won some converts en route and in
America, including some notable figures i n Bishop Hill's history.
Sophie Pollock, who in 1849 became Eric Jansson's second wife, while
born in Gothenburg, had long been living in N ew York when the
prophet, passing through in 1846, won her for the faith. F. U.
Norberg, the stormy petrel of the colony who eventually brought suit
for its dissolution, had been in America since 1842 and came to
Bishop Hill evidently in 1847. Victor Witting, later one of the leaders
140
of Swedish Methodism, was a sailor on ships carrying Janssonists to
America before Joining the colony for a time in 1847. Ragtag
adventurers of Swedish origin but questionable credentials for a
Godly community occasionally passed through, including John Rooth,
Eric Jansson's future murderer, who first showed up with some of his
cronies i n 1847. By the prosperous middle 1850s, the colony had
become more liberal toward those not of its own persuasion. Baron
Axel Adelswärd noted in 1856 that the colonists were "very good to
other poor Swedes who come to them. If they wish they may join
them, but if not they may stay with them for some time and are fed
and housed free."23 It is not unlikely that some did elect to remain.
Janssonism was Swedish in fact but universal in theory. C. G.
Blombergsson claimed that Eric Jansson, during his brief stay in N ew
York in 1846, made a number of converts including some who could
not understand a word of Swedish but were impressed by his
conviction and manner. Once at Bishop Hill, the prophet began
training a select group, the "Twelve Apostles," to carry the Word
throughout the world.24
In 1847, Cleng Peerson, the celebrated "Pathfinder" of the
Norwegian immigration since the 1820s, now a man of sixty-five
years, joined the colony, sold his property in Missouri for the benefit
of the common fund, and took a Swedish wife. The marriage seems
to have turned sour, however, and Peerson departed for the Norwe­gian
Fox River settlement in La Salle County in 1849, leaving his
young wife at Bishop H i l l . 2 5 In the latter year, meanwhile, Jonas
Nylund from Hälsingland led a sizable party to Bishop Hill,
consisting mainly of converts he had made in Norway. Cholera broke
out by the time they reached La Salle, which they then brought to
Bishop Hill, setting off the disastrous epidemic of that year. Accord­ing
to the Lutheran pastor and historian Eric Norelius in 1890, the
surviving Norwegians seem to have moved on to Mission Point on
the Fox River and most of them later became Mormons. Eric Johnson
claimed, however, that three of them stayed on in Bishop H i l l . 2 6
Despite their valiant attempts to learn English—after finding to
their dismay upon arriving in America that they d id not possess the
gift of tongues—the 'Twelve Apostles" met with scant success in their
efforts to convert the unredeemed, with one possible exception.
Indeed, little seems to be known about their labors except in the case
of the tailor Nils Hedin, who visited the Rappists in Economy,
Pennsylvania, the Oneida colony in N ew York state, and Hopedale
in Massachusetts. He is even reputed to have persuaded twenty-five
141
or thirty persons i n Hopedale to move to Bishop Hill. Eric Johnson
wrote that Hedin recruited "a number of persons" from a religious
Utopian colony in Massachusetts. Hedin paid for their transportation
to Bishop Hill, where they were hospitably received. But when the
desired amalgamation failed to work out, the colony paid their return
fare to the East as well as compensation for the work they had done.
There was much contact with the Shakers at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky.27
At any event, the United States census of 1850 shows a single
American family named Hinton from Tennessee and the German-born
bricklayer August Bandholtz living in Bishop Hill. In 1860 the
census reveals only Swedish-born residents and their Illinois-born
children. Neither of these censuses can, however, be considered
entirely reliable.28 Only with the census of 1870, nearly a decade after
the dissolution of the colony, does any influx of non-Swedes become
apparent.
Paul Elmen has pointed to the Janssonists' unresolved dilemma of
seeking "to achieve a monastic exclusiveness and separation and, at
the same time, launch a furious effort to transform and penetrate the
world."2 9 The possible conversion to Janssonism and residence at
Bishop Hill—real or alleged—of non-Swedes remains one of the
obscurest yet most tantalizing aspects of the colony's history. Clearly
there was much coming and going at Bishop Hill during the colony
period and the community seems to have been surprisingly open to
outsiders. The story of its relations with non-Swedish Americans
deserves further research.
It has meanwhile been repeatedly alleged that Bishop Hill was the
mother hive to numerous daughter colonies both near and far. "In
various parts of the west," Olov Isaksson has written, "settlements
arose, populated by ex-colonists."30 Such new centers of Swedish
settlement would naturally have attracted other Swedish immigrants
to their respective areas. Where, specifically, did members—or most
frequently ex-members—of Eric Jansson's sect settle outside of their
Utopia, and under what circumstances?
A special case, previously noted, was that of the defecting
Janssonists who remained in Chicago, beginning in 1846. Although
they d id not really comprise a "daughter colony" of Bishop Hill, since
they had never lived there, they constituted for a time a little "colony"
of their own because most of the twenty-seven persons who left the
Janssonists in Chicago that first year lived to begin with in a house
on Illinois Street between Dearborn and State. They were the first
sizable group of Swedes to settle in the city. Gustaf Unonius, now
142
ordained as an Episcopal priest, first visited Chicago in 1848 and
began his ministry there the following year. He found that the former
Janssonists, who had been compelled to relinquish their worldly
goods to the sect, had been "left almost naked and starving in a
strange land." They provided much of the original membership of his
St. Ansgarius Church. In time other defectors drifted back to Chicago
from Bishop Hill. Together with those few of their countrymen who
had preceded them, ex-Janssonists formed the nucleus of what would
soon become America's Swedish metropolis above all others.31
The largest mass exodus out of the colony took place in the fall of
1848, as seen. Between 200 and 300 persons left at that time, defying
anathema and despite the forfeiture of their goods. Most went first to
Victoria in Knox County, which quickly became a predominantly
Swedish community and the stronghold of embittered anti-Jans¬
sonism.32 Before long increasing numbers settled in other nearby
communities, such as Kewanee, Woodhull, and Alpha in Henry
County; Galesburg, Henderson Grove, Wataga, Oneida, and Altona
in Knox County; La Fayette and Toulon in Stark County; and in Rock
Island and Moline. Carolyn Wilson has found evidence that a group
of Bishop Hill colonists became Baptists and moved to Galesburg
around 1857, where they briefly published a Baptist newspaper,
Frihetsvännen, edited by the former Janssonist Svante Cronsioe. This
group seems to have at least considered moving to Red Oak, Iowa.
From the later 1860s, these break-away groups were joined by
increasing numbers from Bishop Hill following the dissolution of the
Colony and the economic problems this caused many of its former
members. The life and career of Olof Krans is instructive in this
regard: although celebrated as the painter of Bishop Hill colony life
and the portraitist of its pioneers, he spent most of his life residing
and working as a house painter in Galesburg and Altona.33
Galva, a few miles to the southeast, was meanwhile a "daughter
colony" of Bishop Hill in the fullest sense. The town was platted by
two American entrepreneurs in 1854, whereupon the Bishop Hill
colony immediately purchased a block of fifty lots. This gave them so
predominant an interest in the enterprise that they were able to name
the new town Gefle, after the northern Swedish seaport from which
so many of them had sailed, which was soon corrupted into Galva.
Here the colony built a large warehouse for the shipment of its
products on the newly constructed Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy
Railroad, followed by a pork packing house, a general merchandise
business, a bank, and one of the earliest Swedish-American newspa-
143
pers, Svante Cronsioe's D e n Swenske Republikanen. A number of
Bishop Hill colonists lived here after 1854, or later moved here.34
Another outpost was the village of Nekoma in Henry County, a few
miles southwest of Bishop H i l l , established by the colony in 1854 in
anticipation of a rail line that d id not then materialize.35
Olof K r a n s : self p o r t r a i t.
By the later 1860s, land prices had risen to high levels while the
disastrous crop failures in Sweden between 1867 and 1869 brought a
flood of new immigrants to the existing Swedish communities in the
area. This set off what George M . Stephenson has aptly called the
"swarming of the Swedes" out of Illinois to new areas of settlement,
involving numbers of former Bishop Hill settlers, both from Bishop
Hill itself and from other Illinois communities.3 6
By this time, some former colonists had already left Illinois in
search of greener pastures. In 1850, Jonas Olsson had led a party of
eight gold-seekers to California in an effort to bolster the colony's
sagging economy. While all returned, except for a man named
Stålberg who stayed and C. G. Blombergsson who died there, the
venture may well have caught the imagination of other Illinois
Swedes, encouraging them to go out to California.3 7 That same year,
E. U. Norberg, one of the more controversial and intermittent
members of the colony, took the lead, together with Gustaf Unonius,
in promoting the first Swedish settlement at Chisago Lake in
144
Minnesota. Although Norberg soon returned to Illinois, where he
spent his last years near Toulon, this circumstance has apparently
given rise to the frequent claim that a number of Bishop Hill people
were among the early settlers in that area. The evidence of Eric
Norelius, who knew the community well and gave a detailed listing
of Chisago Lake's Swedish pioneers during the first five years of its
settlement seems, however, to disprove this commonly held idea.38
T h e F a r m e r s ' M e r c a n t i l e C o . , B i s h o p H i l l , a r o u n d I 8 6 0 .
( C o u r t e s y Bishop H i l l H e r i t a g e A s s o c i a t i o n . )
In 1848, Anders Blomberg, a tailor from Orsa in Dalarna, together
with another Janssonist missionary visited the Shaker colony at
Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. He was impressed that the Shakers professed
a perfectionist doctrine similar to the Janssonists'. Returning to
Bishop Hill he urged strict celibacy on the Shaker model—an
experiment that had just been abandoned, at least for the next six
years, by the Janssonists. When this was rejected, Blomberg left
Bishop Hill and p i n ed the Shakers. He was followed around 1854 by
ten others from Bishop Hill, including Eric Jansson's widow, Sophie,
and son, Eric. The sequel is that Anders Blomberg visited Sweden as
a Shaker missionary in 1866-67, resulting in the emigration of sixty-three
persons from Älvdalen in northern Dalarna in 1868, most of
whom went to Pleasant Hill. Here the Swedes lived together in the
West Family House, forming a little colony within the colony. In the
1870s, Charles Nordhoff noted that while most of the Pleasant Hill
145
Shakers were Americans, there were also "a good many Swedes."39
The large-scale movement of Swedes out of their older areas of
settlement in northern Illinois, mainly to the west, beginning in the
later 1860s after the breakup of the Bishop Hill colony, certainly
involved an indeterminable number of former colonists who as
individuals or single families joined larger groups of Swedish land-seekers
without Bishop Hill connections. In such cases they are
difficult, if not impossible, to trace.
There were at least a couple of instances, however, of organized
Bishop Hill ventures for colonization further west. In 1869 Major Eric
Forsse (originally Fors), a Bishop Hill colonist who during the Civil
War had raised and commanded Company D of the 57th Illinois
Voluntary Infantry Regiment, composed of Bishop Hill and Galva
Swedes, led some fifty persons from those communities, among them
several fellow veterans from Company D, to Saline County, Kansas,
where they founded the Falun settlement. A few Swedes, possibly
from Bishop Hill, seem to have arrived there already the year
before.40
B i s h o p H i l l ' s v o l u n t e e r c o m p a n y m u s t e r s at t h e b e g i n n i n g of the C i v i l War.
( C o u r t e s y of B i s h o p H i l l H e r i t a g e A s s o c i a t i o n . )
In a letter from Chicago, Anders Larsson, who had there defected
from the Janssonists in 1846, wrote in June 1873 to Sweden that "quite
146
a number of families" were then planning to leave Bishop Hill to
establish a new Swedish settlement in Kansas, where Captain Eric
Johnson had arranged for the purchase of 100,000 acres. Conditions
were believed to be much more favorable there than in Illinois. The
outcome of this venture remains obscure. Eric Johnson, by his own
account, attempted to establish a Swedish settlement at White City,
Morris County, Kansas, which was frustrated by a plague of
grasshoppers. He thereafter returned to Illinois where he and C. F.
Peterson wrote the history of the Swedes in that state, including his
narrative of the Bishop Hill colony, upon which all others have been
in large part based. Still, the census of 1910 showed 641 persons of
first- and second-generation Swedish stock living in Morris Coun­ty—
a respectable number. Very likely some Bishop Hill people settled
there around 1873, while others may have moved on, possibly to the
Falun settlement.41
A privately published family history tells how in 1880 Olof Saline
found land for his own and at least four other Bishop Hill families
near Minden, Nebraska. Persons in or near Bishop Hill told me in the
spring of 1989 of people from the community who had settled around
Holdredge and Broken Bow, Nebraska, and Clay Center, Kansas.
Preserved necrologies of the colonists and their descendants from
between 1899 and 1919, showing places of death, mention these and
nearby localities and also seem to show minor concentrations in such
places as Madrid, Iowa, and Cedar (Cedar Vale), Kansas. A wide
dispersal is likewise indicated, especially in the Plains states, by the
domiciles of former colonists and their children from states other than
Illinois who attended the first Old Settlers' Day in Bishop Hill in 1896
and the centennial celebration of 1946. Already in 1896 the roster
makes it clear that individuals with Bishop Hill connections were
living throughout the United States.42
It is important to remember that those who moved on were not
o n l y Eric Janssonists and Bishop Hill colonists for longer or shorter
periods. They had relatives, friends, and acquaintances in their old
home parishes in Sweden and in other Swedish settlements in
America. Wherever they relocated, they tended to draw others after
them. In time, the newer settlements had offshoots of their own, some
of which by the end of the century may have been in the Canadian
prairie provinces, making the development truly North American in
scope.
One may wonder whether Bishop Hill folk retained a certain
preference for close-knit communities of their own, even when they
147
resettled among other 'Swedes. There would appear to be signs of
this. Those who moved from Bishop Hill to other northwestern
Illinois localities d id tend to concentrate in the communities already
mentioned, which lay mainly to the south and east of Bishop Hill,
and not in others. The equally Swedish area of settlement to the north
and west, including such places as Andover, Lynn Center, Swedona,
Opheim, and Orion, derived its Swedish population principally from
Småland and Östergötland.43 One thinks, too, of Bishop Hill's colonies
in Kansas and Nebraska, to say nothing of the little group at Pleasant
Hill, Kentucky.
Too much should not be made of this point, perhaps, since both
Swedes and other immigrants tended as a whole to settle, if possible,
with others from their own province, parish, or even village within
a parish, and above all with their own kin. This is well demonstrated
in the case of the Swedes.44
Yet a strong communal sense among the Bishop Hill people
cannot be overlooked. They came from parts of Sweden where
ancient traditions of the byalag, or closely integrated village communi­ty,
were still a powerful social force at the time of their emigration.
This ethic was strongly fortified by a common faith and strictly
regulated communal way of life in the Bishop Hill colony. Here the
old ways long survived its formal dissolution. Most of the colonists
who stayed on there continued to live in the communal buildings. In
1924, Anna Söderblom, wife of Sweden's archbishop, found two of
them still living, including a ninety-four-year-old woman who
preserved intact the dress, manner, and speech of her native Alfta
parish in Hälsingland. "It seems hard to leave their old home,"
Anders Larsson wrote in 1873 of those then preparing to move to
Kansas.45
It was no doubt harder for them than for most since their
particular religious dogmas had exposed them to both official and
popular persecution in Sweden and no little hostility from old
Americans and Swedish Americans alike. Under such circumstances
it was natural that those who had kept the faith should be suspicious
and mistrustful toward the outside world, not least as those who felt
they had been duped by Eric Jansson sought to rehabilitate them­selves
by roundly condemning the sect. Michael A. Mikkelsen, in the
early 1890s, found the old colonists notably reticent in speaking of the
past, which he attributed to embarrassment over revealing the
seeming "absurdities" of their former sect. In the early 1870s, Charles
Nordhoff, after visiting Bishop Hill, reputedly muttered, " D— these
148
people; I can't get anything out of them!'46
"Big B r i c k , " B i s h o p H i l l , a r o u n d 1 8 6 0 . ( C o u r t e s y of B i s h o p H i l l H e r i t a g e A s s o c i a t i o n . )
Even with the fading away of the Janssonist creed the former
colonists tended to remain apart from the Swedish-American
mainstream. The Janssonist doctrine of spiritual perfectionism showed
a marked similarity to Methodism, and indeed some leading
Janssonists, such as Jonas Olsson, seem to have had some contact
with Methodism before leaving Sweden. When the Lutheran
immigrant Trued Granville Pearson from Skåne visited Bishop H i ll
in the mid-1850s and sought to prove to some of the colonists that,
in fact, "they were Methodists, that they invoked the same Biblical
passages and used the same reasoning as the Methodists," he received
the reply, "Is that so, have they already learned so much from us?"
Perhaps there was at least some element of truth in this, for the
Lutheran pastor Lars Paul Esbjörn in Andover wrote in 1850 of the
Methodist missionary Jonas Hedström in Victoria that he often
149
preached "the same as Jansson," in contrast to more orthodox
Wesleyan Methodists.47
It was thus a relatively short step for Eric Janssonists to become
Methodists. Jonas Olsson's brother Olof, the sect's land-seeking scout
in Illinois, turned Methodist already in 1846, as did most of those
who left Bishop Hill for Victoria and its environs in following years.
A Methodist congregation was established in Bishop Hill itself by
1864, and it eventually came to include many of the old colonists.48
Moreover, to leave Bishop Hill, or even to affiliate formally with
another denomination, need not have meant renunciation of the basic
tenets of the Janssonist creed. Those who left, perhaps especially after
the prophet's death in 1850, seem to have done so more from
dissatisfaction with the practical leadership of the colony rather than
doctrinal considerations per se. Gustaf Unonius, upon preaching in
Galesburg in the 1850s, encountered a group of Janssonists who
engaged him so hotly in doctrinal dispute that they pursued him
shouting into the street. Very likely they were residents of Galesburg.
L. P. Esbjörn wrote, already in May 1850—the month of Eric Jansson's
death—that most of the Swedes in Galesburg had been Janssonists
who, although they had left their prophet and his colony, were still
"filled with his false doctrine of sinless perfection." To another
correspondent he wrote that same year that many in his area,
"especially in Galesburg," who had left Bishop Hill, were still
"Janssonists in their hearts."49
Still, Janssonism had developed within the framework of Hälsing­land
Devotionalism with its stress upon the individual search for
truth and salvation. Vilhelm Moberg, in studying the letters of the
Bishop Hill colonists, was impressed with how literate and articulate
they were in comparison to the overall cultural level of the Swedish
peasantry in the mid-nineteenth century.50 Not surprisingly, then,
many of the stronger spirits among them would clearly pursue their
own independent spiritual pilgrimages throughout their lives. Some
of the more ardent former Janssonists in Bishop Hill itself were
attracted to Second Adventism, or in some cases Swedenborgianism.
Some joined the Mission Covenant Church. Many remained outside
of any formal denomination. Bishop Hill people who settled around
Falun, Kansas, beginning in 1869, organized a non-denominational
Free Christian Association, where representatives of various Christian
creeds were allowed to preach. Few former Janssonists, however, ever
returned to the Lutheran fold, from which they had once suffered
such unrelenting persecution.51
150
If those who had followed Eric Jansson in the old land and the
new had something of a siege mentality toward the outside world,
their colony at Bishop Hill did not exist long enough ever to become
a fully integrated community, and this surely had much to do with
their diaspora beyond its confines. The Janssonists, while unified
through faith, came originally from scattered localities in north-central
Sweden with marked differences of material conditions,
traditions, and dialects, at a time when peasant loyalties were still
basically to locality and kin. From the beginning, colonists from
different provinces lived and ate apart in the first primitive dugouts.
It has been shown, for example, that a sizable group from Nora
parish in Uppland, most of them relatively late arrivals, tended to
associate, work, and intermarry with their own kind.52
Local differences surfaced in rivalries over power and influence
within the colony. Although Eric Jansson was himself from Uppland
his main base of support had been in Hälsingland and most of his
trusted lieutenants were from that province, most notably from
Söderala, which gave rise to jealousies and frictions. "God save us
from Hälsinglanders!" one of the early Chicago defectors exclaimed
in exasperation.53 After the murder of Jansson in May 1850, his
widow, Sophie, declared Anders Berglund from Alfta titular head of
the colony until the prophet's son should become of age. But upon
returning from the California gold fields in February 1851, Jonas
Olsson rallied enough support to repudiate any claim to a hereditary
succession and quickly gained the leadership. Of the colony's seven
trustees under its charter of 1853, five including Olsson were from
Söderala. Naturally, the "Söderala Five," as they were called, had to
bear the blame when the colony failed financially after 1857. In the
post-colony period, interestingly enough, Anders Berglund became
a lay preacher to the Methodist faction, while Jonas Olsson preached
to a dwindling Janssonist flock in the old colony church until he
became a Second Adventist around 1870.54
These cleavages within Bishop Hill surely affected movement out
of the colony. Eric Johnson noted that those who had stayed behind
in Chicago in 1846 were "all from Västmanland." It has been observed
that when colonists from Nora departed they tended to settle together
in the same places. The Bishop Hill people who went to Saline
County, Kansas, seem to have been largely from Dalarna, as reflected
by their naming their settlement Falun, after its provincial capital.55 It
would indeed seem surprising if detailed analysis of surviving
biographical data did not bear out that, following the colony episode,
151
the old ties of province, parish, and kinship did not reassert them­selves
among Eric Jansson's followers as they renewed their pilgrim­age
in search of new earthly abodes.
In a longer perspective, the Eric Janssonists accounted for only a
tiny fraction of the one-and-a-quarter million Swedish immigrants
who ultimately came to America and Bishop Hill was only one
among their numerous settlements, large and small, across the
continent. Yet the story of this visionary band and their Utopia on the
Illinois prairie is a thought-provoking reminder that mere numbers
cannot be taken as the sole measure of historic significance.
NOTES
1 Ulf Beijbom, A m e r i k a , A m e r i k a . E n bok o m u t v a n d r i n g e n (Stockholm, 1977), 45; Kjell
Söderberg, D e n första m a s s u t v a n d r i n g e n . E n s t u d i e a v befolkningsrörlighet och e m i g r a t i o n
utgående från Alfta socken i Hälsingland 1 8 4 6 - 1 8 9 5 , Acta Universitatis Umensis, 39
(Stockholm, 1981). In addition to Söderberg, Charles H. Nelson has analyzed the socio­economic
background of the Janssonist emigrants in 'Toward a More Accurate
Approximation of the Class Composition of the Erik Janssonists," S w e d i s h P i o n e er
H i s t o r i c a l Q u a r t e r l y (hereafter S P H Q ) , 26 (1975): 3-15. For printed sources on the Eric-
Janssonists and Bishop Hill, see E. Gustav Johnson, "A Selected Bibliography of Bishop
Hill Literature," S P H Q , 15 (1964): 109-22, and "Bishop Hill Bibliography: Additional
Entries," I b i d . , 16 (1965): 26-30.
2 The best discussion of the background to the Janssonist emigration is in Paul Elmen,
Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h : E r i c Jansson of Bishop Hill (Carbondale, Ill., 1976), 111-14. See also
John Norton, "Parson Baird, Bishop Hill, and Manifest Destiny," S P H Q , 23 (1972):
151-68; Wesley M. Westerberg, "Bethel Ship to Bishop Hill: Document (Letter of Olof
Olsson)," I b i d . , 23 (1972): 55-70; Michael A. Mikkelsen, T h e B i s h o p H i l l C o l o n y : A R e l i g i o u s
C o m m u n i s t i c S e t t l e m e n t in H e n r y C o u n t y , I l l i n o i s , Johns Hopkins University Studies in
Historical and Political Science, 10:1 (Baltimore, 1892), 11-14; Eric Johnson and C. F.
Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s . H i s t o r i s k a a n t e c k n i n g a r (Chicago, 1880), 26-28.
3 Emil Herlenius, E r i k - J a n s i s m e n s h i s t o r i a . Ett b i d r a g till kännedom o m d e t s v e n s ka
sektväsendet (Jönköping, 1900), 59; Alan Swanson, "Erik Jansson's 'Ski Letter,'"
S w e d i s h - A m e r i c a n H i s t o r i c a l Q u a r t e r l y (hereafter S A H Q ) , 35 (1984): 338-45; Alan Swanson,
"The Road to Perfection," S c a n d i n a v i a n S t u d i e s , 60 (1988): 438-39. For the overall
significance of deliberate ordeals of faith as sectarian "commitment mechanisms," see
Rosabeth M. Kanter, C o m m i t m e n t a n d C o m m u n i t y : C o m m u n e s a n d Utopias in Sociological
P e r s p e c t i v e (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), chs. 3-4.
4 Florence E. Janson, T h e B a c k g r o u n d of S w e d i s h I m m i g r a t i o n , 1 8 4 0 - 1 9 3 0 (Chicago, 1931),
181-82; Beijbom, A m e r i k a , 123; Lars Ljungmark, S w e d i s h E x o d u s (Carbondale, Ill., 1979),
20; Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 109,197 n. 1; Ernst W. Olson et al., H i s t o r y of the Swedes
of I l l i n o i s , 2 vols. (Chicago, 1908), I, 228; Erik Wikén, "New Light on the Erik
Janssonists' Emigration," S A H Q , 35 (1984): 221-24, and errata, I b i d . , 36 (1985): 68-69. For
passenger lists for the ships involved and many biographical details, see Nils William
Olsson, S w e d i s h Passenger A r r i v a l s in N e w Y o r k , 1 8 2 0 - 1 8 5 0 (Chicago, 1967) (hereafter
S P A N Y ) and S w e d i s h Passenger A r r i v a l s in U . S . P o r t s ( E x c e p t N e w Y o r k ) , 1 8 2 0 - 1 8 50
152
(Stockholm, 1979) (hereafter S P A N U S ) .
5 Herlenius, E r i k - J a n s i s m e n s h i s t o r i a , 68-69.
"Gunnar Westin, E m i g r a n t e r n a och k y r k a n . B r e v från och till s v e n s k a r i A m e r i k a 1 8 4 9 - 1 8 92
(Stockholm, 1932), 67.
7 Albin Widén, När S v e n s k - A m e r i k a g r u n d a d e s (n.p., [1961]), 21; cf. H . Arnold Barton,
L e t t e r s f r o m the P r o m i s e d L a n d : Swedes in A m e r i c a , 1 8 4 0 - 1 9 1 4 (Minneapolis, 1975), 38-39.
'Vilhelm Moberg, T h e U n k n o w n Swedes: A Book about Swedes in A m e r i c a , Past a n d P r e s e n t,
trans, and ed. Roger McKnight (Carbondale, Ill., 1988), 24. The Swedish original is D e n
okända släkten, 2nd edn. (Stockholm, 1968), 24.
'Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 174.
1 0 Albin Widén, A m e r i k a e m i g r a t i o n e n i d o k u m e n t (Stockholm, 1966), 26-28; Gun
Andersson, "An America-Letter to Alfta in 1847: Who Wrote It?" S P H Q , 31 (1980):
321-41; Moberg, U n k n o w n Swedes, 24-29 (Okända släkten, 24-29).
1 1 Söderberg, D e n första m a s s u t v a n d r i n g e n , 204-15; [Eric Norelius,] E a r l y Life of E r ic
N o r e l i u s ( 1 8 3 3 - 1 8 6 2 ) , A L u t h e r a n P i o n e e r , trans. Emeroy Johnson (Rock Island, Ill., 1934),
98.
12John Norton, trans, and ed., "Anders Wiberg's Account of a Trip to the United States
in 1852-1853," S P H Q , 29 (1978): 105; Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 46.
"Janson, S w e d i s h I m m i g r a t i o n , 127.
1 4 Johan Edvard Liljeholm, D e t t a förlovade l a n d . Resa i A m e r i k a 1 8 4 6 - 1 8 5 0 , ed. Olov
Isaksson (Stockholm, 1981), 40-41.
1 5 Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 121-22.
16See, for example, Janson, S w e d i s h I m m i g r a t i o n , 127.
1 7 Widén, A m e r i k a e m i g r a t i o n e n , 60; Barton, L e t t e r s , 83; Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r ne
i I l l i n o i s , 28.
1 8 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 34-35; Olson et al.. H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of
I l l i n o i s , I, 234; Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 142-44; N. M. Liljegren, N . O. Westergreen,
and C. G. Wallenius, S v e n s k a M e t o d i s m e n i A m e r i k a (Chicago, 1895), 168-69.
1 9 Henry E. Pratt, ed., "The Murder of Eric Jansson, Leader of the Bishop Hill Colony,"
J o u r n a l of t h e Illinois State H i s t o r i c a l S o c i e t y , 45 (1952): 64; Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h,
117, 148; Norton, "Wiberg's Account," 104; Barton, L e t t e r s , 81; Ljungmark, S w e d i sh
E x o d u s , 20.
2 0 Philip J. Stoneberg in Henry L Kiner, H i s t o r y of H e n r y C o u n t y , I l l i n o i s , 2 vols.
(Chicago, 1910), I, 641-42,645; Charles Nordhoff, T h e C o m m u n i s t i c Societies of t h e U n i t ed
S t a t e s (New York, 1965), 348; Mikkelsen, B i s h o p H i l l C o l o n y , 71.
2 1 Eric Norelius, D e s v e n s k a L u t e r s k a Församlingarnas och S v e n s k a r n e s H i s t o r i a i A m e r i k a ,
2 vols. (Rock Island, Ill., 1890, 1916), I, 29-30.
2 2 In 1962, Folke Hedblom met Swedish immigrants who had arrived in Bishop Hill as
late as 1901. See his "Hos hälsingar i Bishop Hill. Frän en Amerika-resa 1962," in
Hälsingerunor. E n h e m b y g d s b o k 1963 (Bollnäs, Sweden, 1963), 17-18.
2 3 Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 103-04, 120, 138-39, 202-03; Olson et al, H i s t o r y of t h e
Swedes of I l l i n o i s , I, 269-70; Barton, L e t t e r s , 81.
2 4 Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 132-33.
2 5 Theodore C. Blegen, "Cleng Peerson and Norwegian Immigration," M i s s i s s i p p i V a l l ey
H i s t o r i c a l R e v i e w , 7 (1921): 323. A somewhat imaginative account is Hjalmar R. Holand,
D e n o r s k e S e t t l e m e n t e r s H i s t o r i e (Ephraim, Wis., 1908), 96-97.
2 6 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 37; Norelius, D e s v e n s k a L u t e r s k a , I, 29;
Olson et al, H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of I l l i n o i s , 227. No persons of Norwegian birth show
up in either the 1850 or 1860 U. S. censuses for Bishop Hill, but in unpublished studies
153
Carolyn Wilson of Minneapolis and Roy Ostrom of Williamsfield, Illinois, have
criticized the 1850 and 1860 censuses, respectively, for being demonstrably incomplete.
Mr. Ostrom remembers of hearing of one "Norsk Ole" in Bishop Hill and his
unpublished listing of necrologies of former colonists includes the Norwegian-born Ole
Anderson, who died in 1901.
2 7 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 47; Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 132-34;
Olov Isaksson and Sören Hallgren, B i s h o p H i l l : A Utopia on t h e P r a i r i e (Stockholm, 1969),
94.
2 8 See note 26, above.
2 9 Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 133.
3 0 Isaksson and Hallgren, Bishop H i l l , 146; cf. 153. This point is strongly stressed in
Söderberg, D e n första m a s s u t v a n d r i n g e n , 208, 217; see also 206 (map).
3 1 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 234; Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 121-22,
148-49; Ulf Beijbom, Swedes in C h i c a g o : A D e m o g r a p h i c a n d Social S t u d y of t h e 1 8 4 6 - 1 8 80
I m m i g r a t i o n , Studia Historica Upsaliensia, 38 (Uppsala, 1971), 44-45; [Gustaf Unonius,]
A P i o n e e r in N o r t h A m e r i c a , 1 8 4 1 - 1 8 5 8 : The M e m o i r s of Gustaf U n o n i u s , trans. Jonas Oscar
Backlund, ed. Nils William Olsson, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, 1950,1960), II, 166-67.
32Norelius, D e s v e n s k a L u t e r s k a , I, 75; Liljegren et al., S v e n s k a M e t o d i s m e n , 168-69.
3 3 See Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , and Olson et al, H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes
of I l l i n o i s for details on early Swedish settlers in these communities, identifying those
who came from Bishop Hill. Part of Johnson and Peterson has been translated by Leroy
Williamson as T h e Swedes in K n o x C o u n t y , Illinois (Galesburg, Ill, 1979). Conversation
with Carolyn A. Wilson, February 1989; J. Oscar Backlund, A C e n t u r y of t h e S w e d i s h -
A m e r i c a n Press (Chicago, 1952), 21-22. Söderberg, D e n första m a s s u t v a n d r i n g e n , 200-03,
emphasizes above-average rates of emigration from the former "Janssonist" parishes in
Sweden down to the end of the nineteenth century. George Swank, P a i n t e r K r a n s : O K
of B i s h o p H i l l C o l o n y (Galva, Ill., 1976).
3 4 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 64-68; Olson et al, H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of
I l l i n o i s , I, 337-40; T h e H i s t o r y of H e n r y C o u n t y , Illinois (Chicago, 1877), 168-70; Barton,
L e t t e r s , 79, 81.
3 5 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 62-63; Kiner, H i s t o r y of H e n r y C o u n t y , I l l . ,
I, 620-21.
3 6 George M. Stephenson, T h e R e l i g i o u s Aspects of S w e d i s h I m m i g r a t i o n (Minneapolis,
1932), title to Ch. 21.
3 7 See Isaksson and Hallgren, B i s h o p H i l l , 155-61; Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i
I l l i n o i s , 39.
^Emeroy Johnson, "Early History of Chisago Lake Re-Examined," S A H Q , 39 (1988):
215-25; Norelius, D e s v e n s k a L u t e r s k a , I, 541-42, 554-58.
3 9 Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 133-34,168, 200 n. 45; Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r ne
i I l l i n o i s , 47; Olson et al., H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of I l l i n o i s , I, 250-51; Olsson, S P A N U S , 95;
E. Gustav Johnson, "A Scholarly Testament," S P H Q , 25 (1975): 125-26; Nordhoff,
C o m m u n i s t i c S o c i e t i e s , 212.
4 0 DeVere E. Blomberg, ed., H e a r t a n d H e r i t a g e : C e n t e n n i a l Reflections—Falun Lutheran
C h u r c h a n d C o m m u n i t y , 1 8 8 7 - 1 9 8 7 (Ellsworth, Kan., 1987), 2,58; Otto Robert Landelius,
S w e d i s h P l a c e - N a m e s in N o r t h A m e r i c a , trans. Karin Franzén, ed. Raymond Jarvi
(Carbondale, Ill., 1985), 73. Conversation with Ronald E. Nelson, Bishop Hill, and John
Norton, Moline, Ill., January, 1989.
4 1 Widén, När S v e n s k - A m e r i k a g r u n d a d e s , 118; Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s ,
297-98; Helge Nelson, T h e Swedes and the S w e d i s h S e t t l e m e n t s in N o r t h A m e r i c a , 2 vols.
154
(Lund, 1943), I, 271, and II, map 55.
4 2 Minnie C. Norlin, K a r i n (n. p., 1936), 45. (This rare source was lent to me by Linda
Holden, Bishop Hill.) Conversations with Ronald E. Nelson and Rias Spet, Bishop Hill,
and Lowell E. Bjorling, Altona, Ill. For attendance at the 1896 and 1946 celebrations, see
Theo. J. Anderson, ed., 1 0 0 Y e a r s : A H i s t o r y of Bishop H i l l , I l l i n o i s (Chicago, 1946), esp.
200-01,235,245-47. The necrologies have been complied by Roy Ostrom, Williamsfield,
Ill.
4 3 Nelson, Swedes and S w e d i s h S e t t l e m e n t s , I, 166.
4 4 See, for example, Robert C. Ostergren, A C o m m u n i t y T r a n s p l a n t e d : T h e T r a n s - A t l a n t i c
Experiences of a S w e d i s h I m m i g r a n t S e t t l e m e n t in the Upper M i d d l e West (Madison, Wis.,
1988).
4 5 Anna Söderblom, E n A m e r i k a b o k (Stockholm, 1925), 196-97; Widén, När S v e n s k - A m e r i ka
g r u n d a d e s , 118.
"'Mikkelsen, Bishop Hill C o l o n y , 6-7.
4 7 Arvid Bjerking, ed., E n skånsk b a n b r y t a r e i A m e r i k a . T r u e d G r a n v i l l e P e a r s o n s självbiografi
(Oskarshamn, Sweden, 1937), 56; Westin, E m i g r a n t e r n a och k y r k a n , 43. Cf. Norelius, D e
s v e n s k a L u t e r s k a , I, 154; Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 24; Elmen, Wheat
F l o u r M e s s i a h , 123-24.
4 8 Olson et al., H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of I l l i n o i s , I, 266; Liljegren et al., S v e n s k a M e t o d i s m e n,
200-03.
4 9Unonius, A P i o n e e r , II, 203; Westin, E m i g r a n t e r n a och k y r k a n , 43; Norelius, D e s v e n s ka
L u t e r s k a , I, 133.
5 0 Moberg, U n k n o w n Swedes, 24.
5 1 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 52-54; Olson et al., H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of
I l l i n o i s , I, 266; Blomberg, H e a r t a n d H e r i t a g e , 2, 58; Lilly Setterdahl, "The End of Eric
Janssonism: Religious Life in Bishop Hill in the Post-Colony Period," W e s t e r n Illinois
R e g i o n a l S t u d i e s , 11 (1988): 39-54.
5 2 Lilly Setterdahl, "Emigrant Letters by Bishop Hill Colonists from Nora Parish,"
W e s t e r n I l l i n o i s R e g i o n a l S t u d i e s , 1 (1978): 127-28.
5 3 Elmen, Wheat F l o u r M e s s i a h , 1 2 2 ; cf. 145.
5 4 Setterdahl, "Emigrant Letters," 121,127-28; Stephenson, R e l i g i o u s A s p e c t s , 70-71; Olson
et al., H i s t o r y of t h e Swedes of I l l i n o i s , I, 266; Mikkelsen, B i s h o p H i l l C o l o n y , 70-71. The
strongly Janssonist parishes of Nora, Torstuna, and Österunda lay in Västmanland
County (län) but were part of the historic province of Uppland, which has sometimes
created some confusion.
5 5 Johnson and Peterson, S v e n s k a r n e i I l l i n o i s , 234; Setterdahl, "Emigrant Letters," 127;
Nelson, S w e d i s h S e t t l e m e n t s , I, 277.
155